首页    期刊浏览 2024年12月04日 星期三
登录注册

文章基本信息

  • 标题:Musick, Marc A., and John Wilson. Volunteers: A Social Profile.
  • 作者:Friedman, Barry D.
  • 期刊名称:International Social Science Review
  • 印刷版ISSN:0278-2308
  • 出版年度:2009
  • 期号:March
  • 语种:English
  • 出版社:Pi Gamma Mu
  • 摘要:Sociologists Marc A. Musick and John Wilson explore a curiosity of life in many countries: the practice of many members of society to donate their labor, usually to charitable nonprofit organizations, without expectation of remuneration or other tangible benefits. Theories of market economics would assume such behavior to be indicative of feeblemindedness or irrationality, but the ubiquitousness of volunteerism requires inquiry into the philosophical, sociological, and psychological bases for decisions to undertake demanding work for free. The authors resourcefully delve into data from numerous surveys of volunteers and non-volunteers in a sophisticated, productive effort to identify characteristics that make people likely to volunteer and, once they have done so, to persist in such activity. Identification of the independent, causal variables has value beyond the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity: If volunteer recruiters know what characteristics make people more likely to be available for persistent voluntary activity, then they can concentrate their recruitment efforts on individuals who have these characteristics, thus enhancing the recruiters' productivity and success. For example, a professionally employed college graduate is more likely to volunteer than an unemployed dropout for at least three compelling reasons: First, the professional is far more apt to feel confident in his/her ability that would make him/her successful in the volunteer job. Second, the professional is more likely to have the resources (notably money, time, and a car) that would facilitate accomplishment of the volunteer role. Lastly, the professional is more likely to be asked to volunteer, insofar as he/she has a greater chance of being present at a meeting or other gathering at which a volunteer recruiter sizes up attendees as potentially useful participants.
  • 关键词:Books

Musick, Marc A., and John Wilson. Volunteers: A Social Profile.


Friedman, Barry D.


Musick, Marc A., and John Wilson. Volunteers: A Social Profile. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. 663 pages. Cloth, $39.95.

Sociologists Marc A. Musick and John Wilson explore a curiosity of life in many countries: the practice of many members of society to donate their labor, usually to charitable nonprofit organizations, without expectation of remuneration or other tangible benefits. Theories of market economics would assume such behavior to be indicative of feeblemindedness or irrationality, but the ubiquitousness of volunteerism requires inquiry into the philosophical, sociological, and psychological bases for decisions to undertake demanding work for free. The authors resourcefully delve into data from numerous surveys of volunteers and non-volunteers in a sophisticated, productive effort to identify characteristics that make people likely to volunteer and, once they have done so, to persist in such activity. Identification of the independent, causal variables has value beyond the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity: If volunteer recruiters know what characteristics make people more likely to be available for persistent voluntary activity, then they can concentrate their recruitment efforts on individuals who have these characteristics, thus enhancing the recruiters' productivity and success. For example, a professionally employed college graduate is more likely to volunteer than an unemployed dropout for at least three compelling reasons: First, the professional is far more apt to feel confident in his/her ability that would make him/her successful in the volunteer job. Second, the professional is more likely to have the resources (notably money, time, and a car) that would facilitate accomplishment of the volunteer role. Lastly, the professional is more likely to be asked to volunteer, insofar as he/she has a greater chance of being present at a meeting or other gathering at which a volunteer recruiter sizes up attendees as potentially useful participants.

Whether a person is attracted to volunteerism by his/her motivations that he/she seeks to satisfy or whether the motivations develop or evolve as a consequence of the voluntary activity is a puzzle. For example, the characteristic of empathy may motivate an individual to offer his/her unpaid labor for a charitable purpose. On the other hand, Musick and Wilson quote sociologist James A. Vela-McConnell, who volunteered to help at a battered-women's shelter because he wanted to meet new people, but the experience cultivated his empathy. As he admits, "While I had originally become involved in order to meet people, I soon became committed to volunteering out of a sense of responsibility to the people I served" (p. 71). Vera-McConnell's testimony is a sample of the complex interaction among variables that complicate any effort to discern why volunteers do what they do and why others decline to volunteer or quickly abandon their short-lived volunteer careers. "This points to a problem with asking people [about] their motives for volunteering as if they preceded the volunteer act," the authors observe. "The actual experience of volunteering often leads to such radical changes in attitudes toward the activity that the original goals are forgotten or the volunteer becomes unable to separate his/her initial reasons for volunteering from the reasons that make sense to him/her now" (p. 71).

Musick and Wilson's findings go beyond the usual simplistic conjecture that volunteers volunteer because they aspire to satisfy private goals, such as obtaining experience that they can use to upgrade their resumes or because they would like to have some authority and prestige that are lacking in their gainful employment. But Musick and Wilson, while not disputing the existence of self-serving motivations in many volunteers, still portray a large population of volunteers whose volunteer behavior is reinforced by little more than a smile from a grateful client and the knowledge that the human family has been made incrementally better off. The authors report that volunteers are less likely to quit because of frustration with their volunteer jobs or burnout, and much more likely to be drawn away from volunteering by family and work obligations, illness, and relocation.

This reviewer was surprised to find only a very brief discussion about friction between volunteers and the paid-staff members who are assigned to supervise the volunteers' work. My own bitter volunteer experience with the American Red Cross (ARC), which I chronicled in my 1997 paper, "Cracking Down on Red Cross Volunteers,'" convinced me that volunteers are routinely recruited by self-serving volunteer managers, directed to do their volunteer work in accordance with the managers' authoritarian preferences, and discouraged or driven away when they press for the opportunity to participate in decision-making about matters pertaining to their own volunteer work. When two of my fellow volunteers in the ARC's Northeast Georgia Chapter offered the advice to two board members that the chapter leadership's heavy-handed management would deplete the chapter's volunteer workforce, the board members replied contemptuously and callously, "There will always be volunteers" (quoted in my paper). My analysis was incited by the literature of political science that celebrates voluntary associations as, in Alexis de Tocqueville's conception, "training grounds for democracy" (Democracy in America, 1840) and the proclamations of charitable organizations, including the ARC, which claim that volunteers are the organization's essential backbone whose skills and intellect need to be treated with as much respect as those of the paid professionals. These are promises that prove, in reality, to be empty.

Musick and Wilson quickly extinguish the squabble about whether the employees are depriving volunteers of their right to participate in decision-making when they sort out the arguments this way: "Non-profits try to solve this problem by clearly stating the adjunct role of the volunteer in relation to the paid staff so that there is no confusion over who is in control" (p. 437). Given my experience, all I can say is: Now they tell me!

The authors' revelation about the status of volunteers as interchangeable parts places their analysis in accord with what all of us have long known about the emerging status of employees in the modern private corporate sector. Just as the relationship between corporate employers and their employees, once commonly life-long, has become a mutually opportunistic and short-term arrangement, a volunteer's connection to a nonprofit organization is now presumed to be ad hoc as well, lasting only until the interests of the paid managers and the volunteers diverge. The new relationship that Musick and Wilson describe is, arguably, a rational and orderly one--as long as the volunteers really are clued in from the start that the nonprofit organizations and their paid recruiters who are soliciting prospective volunteers' unpaid labor do not subscribe to the principle that enduring loyalty ought to be part of this superficial, emotionally hollow bargain.

Barry D. Friedman, Ph.D.

Professor of Political Science

North Georgia College & State University

Dahlonega, Georgia

NOTE

(1) Barry D. Friedman, "Cracking Down on Red Cross Volunteers: How American Red Cross Officials Crushed an Insurrection by Agitated, Mistreated Volunteers in Northeast Georgia," paper presented at the annual meeting of the Georgia Political Science Association, February 21, 1997; reprinted at http://www.NGCSU.edu/bdf/Studies/REDXcd.htm.
联系我们|关于我们|网站声明
国家哲学社会科学文献中心版权所有