Towards a ‘Round Earth’ Map of Volunteering

Abstract

The salient features of the ‘dominant paradigm’ of volunteering in the UK have been discussed in Chapter 4. The development of what has been called the ‘volunteering industry’ — which includes major volunteer-involving organisations; specialist national and local infrastructure bodies; and an emerging profession of volunteer management — is based on a number of widely accepted assumptions about the nature of individual voluntary action. These provide us with narrow definitions of volunteer motivation; the areas of social life in which volunteers are active; the organisational context within which volunteering takes place; and the ways in which volunteering roles are defined. In the process the dominant paradigm ignores or excludes a great deal of volunteer activity to leave us with a partial or, to use David Horton Smith’s (2000) metaphor, a ‘flat earth’ map of the territory. This chapter sets out a more comprehensive or ‘round earth’ approach to volunteering by introducing two additional paradigms and combining them with the dominant model to create a three-perspective map which captures more fully some of the diversity of volunteering. This part of the chapter is based on the argument previously developed by the author and colleagues in Chapter 2 of Volunteering and Society in the 21^st Century (Rochester et al., 2010: 10–16).