seven - The engagement of volunteers in third sector organisations delivering public services

Summary

Introduction

As previous chapters have discussed, various reforms have seen an increasing role for third sector organisations (TSOs) in public service delivery. This has been associated with profound changes within TSOs, including professionalisation, formalisation, bureaucratisation and hybridisation. All these developments have significant implications for the space, nature, experience and outcomes of volunteering within TSOs. All too often, however, the ‘voices and concerns’ of volunteers are ignored in accounts of change within the third sector (Macmillan, 2010: 1). Indeed, the concern raised by Russell and Scott almost 20 years ago for the ‘paucity of strategic thinking on the implications for volunteering of the significant changes … in the roles of the statutory and voluntary sectors’ (1997: 13) largely remains unaddressed.

This chapter brings together evidence from a number of different sources in an attempt to fill some of that gap. We begin to address the question of how the role and experience of volunteers is changing within TSOs as they become increasingly involved in public service delivery and what the implications might be. We do so by drawing on evidence from previously published literature, from England and elsewhere, as well as drawing on primary evidence from a number of in-depth qualitative case studies. In particular, we draw upon a study of volunteer management in hospice care (Hill et al, 2013), and a case study of a small community mediation service (Hill, forthcoming), both of which included interviews with staff, volunteers, service users and funders. Little of this research was explicitly designed to look at how volunteering has been affected by the increased involvement of the third sector in public service delivery, yet together the studies tell compelling stories of volunteering in this context.

The first section of the chapter explores the context for volunteering in TSOs delivering public services at the policy, organisational and societal levels. The second section explores the implications of changes within this context by drawing out five key shifts in dominant logics within TSOs that are affecting volunteering in complicated and overlapping ways. We conclude by discussing some of the broader implications of these developments.