Understanding Inequalities in Volunteering Research: A Systematic Literature Review

• In Event: The Need for Nuance in volunteering

Abstract

The vast majority of research on volunteering and voluntary action has taken place in the Global North by scholars from the Global North. This inherently leads to a one-sided understanding of how volunteering can be defined, and how communities engage in, organize, and benefit from voluntary action globally. For example, most “northern” volunteer definitions assume that a person is working for a formal nonprofit organization or NGO as part of their voluntary service. Yet, research has shown that this is inadequate to understand the varied and various roles of individuals engaging in helping behavior. For example, we know that the “official” definition of volunteering tends to leave out women and people of color from under-represented ethnic and racial groups (Dean, 2021). This current understanding leads to the perpetuation of stereotypes about the Global South and their level of engagement in working together to solve problems.

Perhaps a broader conceptualization that may be useful is that offered by the International Labor Office (ILO, 2011, p. 13), which states that volunteering is “unpaid, non-compulsory work: that is, time individuals give without pay to activities performed either through an organization or directly for others outside their own household.” This definition also captures the role of informal volunteering in our understanding of voluntary action (Einolf et al., 2016). Indeed, when we capture informal volunteering in calculations of voluntary activity across cultures and communities, the disparities in volunteering rates start to even out (Salamon et al., 2017). However, scholars and practitioners interested in volunteering and development still don’t have the tools to bring a more holistic approach to researching this topic. Instead, they (over)rely on those northern definitions.

With this systematic literature review, we try to understand how empirical studies published in four nonprofit management journals - VOLUNTAS, Nonprofit Management and Leadership (NML), Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ), and Voluntary Sector Review - define, explore, and understand volunteering. The sampling frame includes articles published in the aforementioned journals from 2015 and 2022 containing the keywords “volun”, “service”, “helping”, and “informal” in their title and/or abstracts. We used a process similar to that of (Laurett & Ferreira, 2018) in our methodology with four distinct phases: (a) identifying and bounding the universe of articles, (b) developing the codebook, (c) systematically coding these articles, and (d) analyzing and interpreting the resulting themes. We identified 997 articles for our initial review that are currently being reviewed.

With our findings, we hope to explain the current measures of volunteering used by nonprofit scholars, thereby critically and empirically questioning the use of a singular definition of volunteering thereby ignoring various forms of non-traditional forms of helping and voluntary action. By assessing the current state of nonprofit scholarship on volunteering and voluntary action, we hope to encourage scholars to consider new ways to value and measure voluntary action and ensure that the contributions of those who have traditionally been left out of measures of volunteering are counted.

References

Dean, J. (2022). Informal volunteering, inequality, and illegitimacy. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 51(3), 527-544.

International Labor Organization. (2011). Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work. ILO-International Labor Office, Geneva. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---stat/documents/publication/wcms_162119.pdf

Einolf, C. J., Prouteau, L., Nezhina, T., & Ibrayeva, A. R. (2016). Informal, Unorganized Volunteering. In D. H. Smith, D. H. Smith, D. H.

Smith, D. H. Smith, D. H. Smith, R. A. Stebbins, J. Grotz, & J. Grotz (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Volunteering, Civic Participation, and Nonprofit Associations (pp. 223–241). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Laurett, R., & Ferreira, J. J. (2018). Strategy in nonprofit organisations: A systematic literature review and agenda for future research. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 29, 881-897.

Salamon, L., Haddock, M. A., & Sokolowski, S. W. (2017). Closing the Gap? New Perspecitives on Volunteering North and South. In J. Butcher & C. J. Einolf (Eds.), Perpsectives on Volunteering: Voices from the South (pp. 29–52). Springer International Publishing.

Authors

• Dyana Mason, Dept of Planning, Public Policy and Management

• Kaushal R Sapkota