Volunteers: A Social Profile (review)

When David Sills published his seminal book, The Volunteers, in 1959, he had little empirical research to review. His study of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, now known as the March of Dimes, analyzed a major social phenomenon, a nationwide mobilization to “fight” polio by volunteering and donating money. By the time his book was published, this effort had already achieved its main goal since the National Foundation had largely but not completely funded the development and clinical trials for the Salk polio vaccine. Sills was only able to draw upon a handful of works that studied volunteerism, voluntary associations and the nature and role of civil society and civic engagement. But his examination, still interesting and now of historical value, set the stage for other studies of volunteerism and civic engagement.

Nearly three decades ago when I began to study volunteering, most of the literature, aside from Sills work, Lipset’s Union Democracy and DeTocqueville, was highly speculative and was mainly based on the experiences and observations of volunteer directors. The literature on volunteering was substantial, but little of it had the kind of methodological rigor and theoretical insights of more recent work, most notably work by the two authors of this volume and a number of their collaborators.

Since then, we have come to a far greater understanding of volunteers, volunteerism and a host of broader issues of the organizations and institutional structures that influence volunteer work. Volunteering itself has become far more institutionalized and harder to define with the growth of public programs promoting volunteerism, greater use of volunteers in both the public and corporate sectors (defined as ‘interns’) and payment (not wages) to volunteers in the form of stipends, scholarships and payment for expenses. Most recently, scholars studying civil society organizations have been faced with a perplexing paradox: there has been a sharp decline in organizational memberships–a phenomenon widely referred to as ‘bowling alone’ (described by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone)–but, at the same time, a larger proportion of Americans have been engaged in volunteer work albeit donating fewer hours over the course of a year than was true in the past.

Over the past two decades, the empirical and theoretical insights about volunteering have grown enormously. This is a highly interdisciplinary area of study with important work done by economists, psychologists and sociologists. Musick and Wilson have done scholars and students an enormous service by doing a careful review of the sociological literature. To say that this is an encyclopedic volume is not an understatement.

The book offers detailed coverage of the empirical literature on volunteering. The six major parts of the book–the Introduction, Subjective Dispositions, Individual Reseources, the Social Context of Volunteer, the Organization of Volunteer Work, and the Consequences of Volunteering–each offer a clear and well-organized discussion of various dimensions of the broader subject of volunteerism. Each individual chapter is a stand-alone review of the literature on issues like motivations, the role of values, norms and attitudes, and the importance of gender, race and the life course.

But, this is not simply a literature review. The book includes a series of discussions based on the authors’ analysis of empirical data from several different data sets including Independent Sector and Americans’ Changing Lives. There are also a number of incredibly insightful observations included in the volume which have the potential of leading to a major reconsideration of current best practices. For example, using the ACL data, the authors found that “the more hours people volunteered before retirement the more likely they were to cut back on the number of hours volunteered after retirement.” This finding challenges current policies which are designed to tap the extra time people gain when they retire, an effort that is currently garnering significant amounts of public and foundation resources in anticipation of the retirement of baby boomers.

The book’s major strengths are, however, also a deficit. In doing the careful stand-alone chapters that cover major issues hard to...