Accounting for the Varieties of Volunteering: New Global Statistical Standards

In recent years, scholars have engaged in teasing out a universally valid definition of volunteering. The challenge is that the proposed general definitions are strained by multiple area-based cultural and material factors (e.g. the trend towards individualism, the specific national and sub-national traditions and regulations, the organizational forms of volunteering, the individual motivations, etc.). This heterogeneity has placed significant obstacles to the adoption of a standard definition of volunteering by the scholars, official statistics and practitioners.

Until recently, international studies on volunteering lacked standardized data sets allowing methodologically robust comparative analyses although the field had a good number of single nation or area surveys. But the International Labour Office (ILO) and the United Nations have now provided global statistical standards for organization-based and direct volunteering with the potential for comparison. But can they really account for the varieties of volunteering and further develop our knowledge?

Beyond illustrating which innovations these statistics bring and critically assessing the continuing tensions between the global standards and the local differences, the book shows how the ILO and the UN guidelines can be implemented into national statistics and which new advancements in the understanding of contemporary volunteering they allow, namely about characters, antecedents and impacts of organized and of individual volunteering.