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The Commonalities of Volunteering: How Consensus Global Definitions Accommodate Regional Variations and Why It Is Important to Use Them

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Accounting for the Varieties of Volunteering

Part of the book series: Nonprofit and Civil Society Studies ((NCSS))

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Abstract

This chapter calls attention to the elaborate, 20-year, bottom-up, collaborative research and consensus-building process that has led to the best hope for generating a regular, coherent, cross-nationally comparable, empirical picture of the scale, composition, demographic profile, and forms of volunteering in countries throughout the world. In the process, it explains why improved, systematic, and comparable data on volunteering is so crucial to strengthening the role of volunteering and improving volunteer management, details the obstacles that have stood in the way of a consensus approach to conceptualizing and measuring volunteer work, outlines how these obstacles were addressed, and lays out the volunteer measurement strategy now enshrined in official United Nations and International Labor Organization guidance manuals as a consequence. Finally, the chapter outlines a set of next steps for improving understanding of volunteer work, explains how the establishment of a common conceptualization and measurement method can contribute to this further understanding, and issues a call to the volunteer promotion community to rally behind the recently developed consensus volunteer measurement approach and encourage official statistical agencies to implement the measures it calls for.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Regular surveys of volunteering are currently conducted by the statistical offices of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, and the United States. The Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work developed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies with support from United Nations Volunteers has been adopted by the International Labour Organization and is available for adoption by countries. A discussion of this Manual is presented in the final section of this chapter.

  2. 2.

    The number of Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) volunteer workers is computed by dividing the total number of volunteer hours revealed by the survey by the average hours in a full-time job in the given country.

  3. 3.

    To facilitate this translation, both the ILO Manual (p. 32) and the UN TSE Sector Handbook (p. 70) provide references to the International Standard Classification of Occupations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Civil Society Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Lester M. Salamon

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  1. Lester M. Salamon
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Correspondence to Lester M. Salamon .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Riccardo Guidi

  2. Csv Lazio, Rome, Italy

    Ksenija Fonović

  3. Division for Population Register, Demographic and Living Conditions Statistics, Istat, Rome, Italy

    Tania Cappadozzi

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Salamon, L.M. (2021). The Commonalities of Volunteering: How Consensus Global Definitions Accommodate Regional Variations and Why It Is Important to Use Them. In: Guidi, R., Fonović, K., Cappadozzi, T. (eds) Accounting for the Varieties of Volunteering. Nonprofit and Civil Society Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70546-6_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70546-6_2

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