Increasing third-party intervention in volunteering represents a key change in the environment of volunteering. One significant expression is “workfare volunteering”: the governmental use of ...volunteering to foster the economic and/or social reintegration of social assistance recipients. We contribute to existing theory on “third-party volunteering” by studying the shifting discursive field in which volunteering becomes re-entangled with workfare volunteering. Our contribution is based on a governmentality-inspired discourse analysis of internal documents on workfare volunteering in one Belgian social assistance center. We conclude that workfare volunteering entails a strong violation of “voluntary” and “unpaid” properties of volunteering, relegates volunteering to an inferior status relative to paid work, and depicts workfare volunteers as suffering from a clear deficit: the inability to work under regular labor market condition. Through the discursive entanglement of various citizenship frames, the workfare volunteer is cast as an ever-aspiring, yet permanently failing citizen.
Inspired by the analytical shift toward understanding altruism from an institutional perspective, this article presents an empirical analysis of the impact of institutionalized solidarity on ...attitudes toward payment for blood or plasma donations, in terms of both the level of welfare provision and confidence in the welfare system. Postulating that institutionalized solidarity is intertwined with group-based solidarity, this article offers a more refined understanding of the relationship between institutional context and attitudes toward paid donation by incorporating measures of social cohesion in the analysis. Based on Eurobarometer data from 2014, the results indicate that support for cash payment for donation is lower in European countries where social spending is higher. Similarly, aggregated levels of trust in the social security system are associated with less support for payment for donation. These findings point to the importance of institutionalized solidarity for the manifestation of support for non-remunerated blood and plasma donation.
Although European blood collection organizations are currently obtaining sufficient and safe blood from the majority population, they report having difficulty recruiting first and second-generation ...immigrants from non-European countries. Most existing studies on these underrepresented groups, who have been coined the “missing minorities” in blood donation, have adopted an instrumental approach that focuses on the development of targeted recruitment strategies to overcome specific barriers to donation faced by members of these minorities. Although this approach does offer several short-term benefits, our central argument is that it is one-sided in its questioning of the non-participation of ethnic minorities. The literature currently lacks research on how the blood procurement system is failing to include minorities. Drawing on recent social theory, we seek a broader sociological understanding of minority under-representation in blood donor populations by shifting the analytic focus toward a critical examination of the main pillars of the procurement system within the European context. This paper advances a novel analytical framework based on two general propositions. First, we apply the literature on “citizenship regimes” to argue that blood donation is part of one specific institutionalization of citizenship and solidarity. We then reconceptualize the “problem” of missing minorities in European blood donation as an application for social change, suggesting avenues related to blood collection as a way of renegotiating minority-majority relations of solidarity.
Volunteering research focuses predominantly on predicting participation in volunteering, proceeding from the quasi-hegemonic foundation of resource theory and dominant-status theory. Empirical ...research in this tradition has provided extremely robust evidence that dominant groups in society are more likely to volunteer. At the same time, it has reinforced the status quo in the production of knowledge on volunteering, thereby neglecting the clear problematic of “inequality in volunteering.” Compared to the guiding question of “participation,” the concept of “inequality” can generate a more variegated, critical, and change-oriented research agenda. With this special issue, we aim to build a “new research front” in the field of volunteering. In this introduction, we advance a novel research agenda structured around a multidimensional understanding of inequality, concomitantly delineating four central research programs focusing on (a) resources, (b) interactions, (c) governmentalities, and (d) epistemologies. We discuss the focus of these lines of research in greater detail with respect to inequality in volunteering, their main critique of dominant research on participation in volunteering, and key elements of the new research agenda.
BACKGROUND
Ageing European populations put pressure on national blood supplies, increasing the need for blood and donor base rejuvenation. Therefore, we investigate how European countries' blood ...donor populations differ and how they have evolved over the last 2 decades. Previous comparative research, based on 1994 Eurobarometer data, indicate that the typical donor is an educated, middle‐aged, white, married male. Other sociodemographic and socioeconomic correlates, such as employment status and type of community, are less clear.
STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS
Multilevel analyses are performed on repeated cross‐level data from the Eurobarometer (waves 1994, 2002, 2009, and 2014) to compare information on “ever having donated” across sociodemographic categories, countries, and periods.
RESULTS
There are consistent but moderate country and period differences. The donor population rose to become largest in most countries by 2009, and stabilized thereafter. Over the studied period, donors were more likely to be higher educated, married men. Nevertheless, changes across time in donor profiles within countries did occur. Women were less likely to donate blood, especially in Southern and Eastern Europe, but this gender gap has declined. Furthermore, educational attainment seems more relevant for women, although, more recently, to a lesser extent.
CONCLUSION
Although there is a promising trend in which women, young people, and students are increasingly likely to donate, more attention is needed to reach the unemployed and the low to medium educated. Because the unemployed may lack structural opportunities to donate, and the low to medium educated may lack relevant knowledge on blood donation necessity, we recommend providing practical opportunities and information on the necessity of blood donation.
Corporations are increasingly interested in promoting corporate volunteering, and their efforts are aligned with supportive nonprofits and public policies. The article seeks to understand the reasons ...for this growing interest. It is based on insights from an ethnographic exploration of corporate volunteering activities in a transnational nonprofit that involves highly skilled corporate volunteers in its programs of entrepreneurship education. A multi-sited fieldwork was conducted in the organization’s program offices and its corporate partners in the United States, Belgium, and Israel. The analysis demonstrates how corporate volunteering conjoins various elements—ideological, interactionist, symbolic, and ethical—to maintain the creative engagement of highly skilled employees in cognitive capitalism. The article thus argues that the increasing interest in corporate volunteering emerges from a classwide rationality that extends beyond instrumental interests of particular corporations, as corporate volunteering constitutes a governmentality technique that molds employees’ subjectivities and maintains their wider commitment to capitalism.
To ensure safe, sufficient supplies of human blood for European medical practice, national blood establishments reconcile the social image of blood donation with technical risk calculations/deferral ...policies. The sociotechnical controversy concerning the deferral of “men who have sex with men” (MSM) serves as a pre-eminent case of this challenge. Drawing on the framework of sociotechnical imaginaries, we developed an interpretive case study of negotiation on the deferral of MSM in policy discourse and the public debate between the implementation of the first EU Blood Directive (2003) and the relaxation of lifetime deferral to 12 months in Belgium (2017). We analyzed recurrent arguments made by stakeholders through the High Council for Health policy recommendations, public communications of Red Cross Flanders, and the public debate evidenced in Belgian newspapers. Instances in which MSM deferral is negotiated are part of the co-production of blood- and donor safety. This process allowed to adapt the dominant epidemiological imaginary shaping blood supply risk governance practices in four phases: classic epidemiological imaginary, challenging key elements, contentious debate, and re-adjustment. Deferral became recognized as preclusion from this institutional opportunity to demonstrate high moral virtues. This sociotechnical controversy will likely resurface, as sexually active gay men continue to be deferred.
Recent scholarly discussions on agency relate the concept to privilege, affect and subject formation, while challenging its equation with resistance to structural limitations. This article utilizes ...these discussions in a new terrain of ethnographic exploration: the engagement of corporate volunteers with underprivileged youth, coordinated by a transnational nonprofit that relies on corporate sponsorship. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic study that followed these activities in the US, Belgium and Israel, the article describes how corporate volunteers and coordinators projected an individualized and optimistic agency onto the beneficiaries of their activity, while perceiving their own agency as limited despite their privileged position. The simultaneous use of these two contradictory notions of agency governs employees’ engagement at work and their ideological adherence to corporate capitalism, making ‘agency’ a resource of neoliberal governmentality. These ethnographic insights contribute to explaining why corporations are increasingly interested in promoting volunteering as a salient Corporate Social Responsibility strategy.
Since British sociologist Titmuss authoritatively conceived blood donation as an altruistic ‘gift relationship’, blood establishments have adopted blood’s highly symbolic status as a core ...professional belief. However, important developments since the 1970s have resulted in blood’s bio-objectification, making blood a renewed object of concern. Because different versions of this bio-object are simultaneously present and interfere with one another, we ask how the organization renders this multiplicity workable? Studying how ontological versions are enacted in a specific blood establishment and how the organizational model of a blood establishment functions as a mode of coordination, we develop a praxiographic appreciation of blood in the context of a specific Belgian blood establishment. We show how the organizational mode of coordination allocates versions of blood in specific departments along functional and chronological dimensions. Blood remains the object of a gift relationship but is accompanied by blood’s enactment and representation as the object of suspicion, management, research/biology, and a blood economy. Furthermore, the organizational mode of coordination also allocates personalized and depersonalized enactments according to the level of contact with the donor population. This reflects a third dimension: (de)personalization of blood. Whereas the organizational mode of coordination is successful in rendering blood’s multiplicity workable, at times, it causes suboptimal practices. Moreover, we showed how sometimes a focus on intra-departmental modes of coordination is necessary to understand how blood’s multiplicity complicates the practices of the blood establishment.
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