Continuity and Change in Voluntary Action: Patterns, Trends and Understandings

✍ Scribed by Rose Lindsey; John Mohan

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 279
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

There are great expectations of voluntary action in contemporary Britain but limited in-depth insight into the level, distribution and understanding of what constitutes voluntary activity. Drawing on extensive survey data and written accounts of citizen engagement, this book charts change and continuity in voluntary activity since 1981. How voluntary action has been defined and measured is considered alongside individuals’ accounts of their participation and engagement in volunteering over their lifecourses. Addressing fundamental questions such as whether the public are cynical about or receptive to calls for greater voluntary action, the book considers whether respective government expectations of volunteering can really be fulfilled. Is Britain really a “shared society”, or a “big society”, and what is the scope for expansion of voluntary effort? This pioneering study combines rich, qualitative material from the Mass Observation Archive between 1981 and 2012, and data from many longitudinal and cross-sectional social surveys. Part of the Third Sector Research Series, this book is informed by research undertaken at the Third Sector Research Centre, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and Barrow Cadbury Trust.

✦ Table of Contents

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN VOLUNTARY ACTION
Contents
List of figures and tables
Figures
Tables
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Notes on authors
Acronyms
1. Introduction
How and why people volunteer: definition and measurement, motivations and meanings
Sources and methods
Structure of the book
2. The changing policy environment for voluntary action from 1979
Introduction
‘A crescendo of political rhetoric’: the Conservative governments, 1979–97
New Labour and hyperactive mainstreaming
The Big Society, localism and the kaleidoscope of voluntary action
Conclusions
3. Data: sources and definitions
Introduction
Quantitative data: longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of voluntary action
Qualitative data sources: Mass Observation Project
Analytical decisions: selection and analysis of individual writers and survey respondents
How the datasets fit together
Conclusion
4. Trends in volunteering and trends in the voluntary sector
Introduction
Aggregate trends in voluntary action, 1981–2016
The nature of volunteering behaviour 1981–2012: how do MOP writers describe what they do?
Trends in the voluntary sector
Discussion
5. Content and context of volunteering
Introduction
Quantitative analyses: the balance between formal and informal volunteering, and the nature of the voluntary activities that individuals carry out
Qualitative evidence: the where, to whom and what of voluntary activity
Conclusions
6. Why people volunteer: contextualising motivation
Introduction: challenges of obtaining accounts of volunteer motivation
Data
Vignettes: synopses of writers’ volunteering lifecourses
Influences, triggers or motives – what’s the difference?
Motive and recall of anticipation of benefits
Conclusion: volunteering motives and the lifecourse
7. Volunteering trajectories: individual patterns of volunteering over the lifecourse
Introduction
Quantitative evidence
The shape of writers’ trajectories
Routes into and out of volunteering
Conclusion
8. Attitudes to voluntary action
Introduction
Survey data from the British Social Attitudes Survey and from the National Survey of Voluntary Activity
Attitudinal material from the Mass Observation Project, 1996 and 2012
Responses to the idea of the Big Society
Conclusion
9. Conclusions
Overview
Future scenarios
Appendix: Anonymised list of writers
References
Index