Abstract
Volunteering has gained widespread public and political interest in recent years. Policy debates have taken place in many countries focusing on how to preserve and encourage volunteering, and various parliamentary and government commissions have studied ways to stimulate voluntary activities among diverse groups such as the young and the elderly, working parents and immigrants. 2001 was the United Nations Year of Volunteers, and this gave rise to all kinds of national and local manifestations, discussions and policy initiatives, often with a lot of media exposure. In the burgeoning social sciences literature on the (assumed) decline of civic community, the crumbling of civil society, and the erosion of social capital, volunteering is an indicator of the negative trends as well as a possible instrument for recovery. Volunteering is not just an expression of individual engagement and a spontaneous result of community life; it is often consciously organized and managed and it can be made an object of policymaking. This mixture of voluntariness and organization in the establishment of prosocial behavior makes volunteering a very interesting phenomenon.
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Dekker, P., Halman, L. (2003). Volunteering and Values. In: Dekker, P., Halman, L. (eds) The Values of Volunteering. Nonprofit and Civil Society Studies. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0145-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0145-9_1
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