Beyond our grasp?

Volunteering defies definition.

Or at least attempting to define volunteering has been a pretty thankless task. It just seems to stoke passions and inspire indifference in equal measure. The discussions it does engender tend to produce more heat than light.

In the last year or so in the UK, one of the most concerted efforts to spell out what volunteering is comes from the Institute of Volunteering Research in its paper titled: "A rose by any other name …’ Revisiting the question: ‘what exactly is volunteering?" (PDF) penned by Angela Ellis Paine, Matthew Hill and Colin Rochester.

It's a really interesting and thorough piece of work, pulling together a lot of research into volunteering. Yet it also illustrates the problem we face when seeking to identify the defining principles of volunteering.

The theorist's need to anchor our view of volunteering on defining principles, risks marooning our understanding of volunteering in practice.

The paper pulls out three principles of volunteering: it's an activity that's (i) unpaid; (ii) undertaken through an act of free will; and, (iii) of benefit to others.

No surprises

I've no reason to particularly dispute the principles the authors have plumped for. My skepticism concerns the relative merit of the pursuit of conceptual clarity, if we limit the scope of that search to research within pre-defined material. Or to use a detective metaphor, the result of the police investigation ain't much of a surprise if they just pull in the usual suspects for interview.

An understanding of volunteering that's built on a body of knowledge (classified as volunteering research by underlying assumptions about what is and isn't volunteering research), inevitably leads to limited conclusions. That's to say, setting out volunteering's defining principles can only go so far, if we're basing them on a narrow seam of research that's largely self-classified volunteering research. It's to be expected then, that the conclusions of such an investigation turn out to be broadly consistent with the initial assumptions about what volunteering is.

The paper itself wrestles with this paradox. It signals a "lack of clarity about the boundaries of the field", yet sets its goal as a "more nuanced understanding of volunteering" (P.5). So on the one hand, volunteering's a concept that's too fuzzy, but on the other, it's a concept that's too fixed. Why does so much inquiry into the nature of volunteering result in so much tail-chasing?

Open vs Closed; Fluid vs Static

Volunteering's an activity that is open, broad-based and fluid. Yet searching for volunteering in amongst the small, niche and the latest literature on volunteering tends to edge us inescapably towards a view of volunteering that's more closed, narrow and static. Volunteering boxed up into airtight containers may be convenient for academics, but it risks a certain understanding about volunteering getting packed away and forgotten about. This approach makes it harder, not easier, to relate this overly delineated concept to our actual day-to-day experience of volunteering.

So to repeat, if volunteering is an extremely open, broad-based and fluid notion it's awfully likely that it's a notion that's got holes in it, that it's vague and subject to change. All things that definition seekers can't abide. As volunteering as a term has become more mainstream, I feel many of us have worried that these holes are increasingly inconvenient leaks we need to plug.

Far from it. I'd argue that we can equally see such fluidity and flexibility as a strength. Rather than leaching coherency, these properties of volunteering provide us with opportunities philosophically, to link our understanding of volunteering with many of the great debates and controversies of our era.

Let's connect our ideas about volunteering

In fact, the work we need to undertake now is to connect our ideas about volunteering with others. We need to look outwards, not inwards. For academics, that means drawing directly on research across the fields of knowledge. For practitioners, that means taking inspiration from the experience of other sectors.

As an illustration of what I mean, a little digging uncovers how our ideas about volunteering are built on some of the most fiercely debated questions of the modern age. For example, one idea about volunteering that I'm particularly fond of is that it is:

"Giving time freely for the benefit of strangers"

It's clear that to understand "giving time freely" there are plenty of parallels with the question of free will. The notion of giving time "for the benefit of" takes us clearly into the territory of thinking about social contracts. As regards giving time for the benefit of "strangers", it an idea that sends us headlong into social questions that arise from industrialisation.

Yet why do we so rarely relate these wider issues to how we talk about volunteering? Instead, most discussions about the meaning of volunteering tend to be pretty inside baseball. The narratives are niche and little known or heard outside the volunteering sector. By the way, I'm not talking about rebranding or marketing volunteering differently. I'm talking about rethinking the way we conceptualise volunteering.

So let's just look more closely at these other controversies and to get a flavour of what I'm referring to here. In this first post I'm going to kick off with a quick look at the concept of free will and how it relates to our understanding of volunteering.

Free will

The debate about free will goes back centuries. It's fair to say, that it's a problem that's attracted the attention of some of the world's finest minds. So how might we go about relating it to the way we think about volunteering?

Much of the controversy surrounding free will centres on two fundamental and seemingly incompatible intuitions we have as human beings.

The first is the sense we have that what happens in the world around us is caused or determined by certain conditions or laws.

The second is the sense we have that our lives face an open future and that we can intervene in what happens in the world by choosing to act or not to act in certain ways.

Are we really free to volunteer?

The first intuition that there are forces and laws of nature at work behind everything that happens, leads us to the logical conclusion that we live in a world where everything is determined in advance. As Albert Einstein put it:

"Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not
free agents but are as causally bound as the stars in their
motion."

Or take Charles Darwin:

"…one doubts existence of free will [because] every action
determined by heredity, constitution, example of others or
teaching of others." "This view should teach one profound
humility, one deserves no credit for anything…nor ought one to
blame others.”

From Darwin’s notebooks, quoted in Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, pp. 349-50.

If the determinists are right, who would volunteer? What would be the point of volunteering if our choice to volunteer did not actually make a difference? It would surely diminish our motivation to volunteer. How could we motivate others to act? Why would anyone volunteer if they believed that life's outcomes are predetermined?

In this sense, those promoting volunteering are libertarians. We believe the world around us is undetermined and our actions can make a difference. A possible determinist explanation of why people volunteer would be that it's largely due to how it makes us feel (that we are making a difference), not because we can actually intervene and bring about real change.

What's causes us to volunteer?

Yet we're fascinated in what causes us to volunteer and extent to which volunteering is determined. We’re driven to analyse the reasons why we act the way we do. For example, if we could understand what causes someone to volunteer, we could better promote volunteering across society.

While most would passionately agree that we volunteer out of choice, we would not go as far as to say that whether one person volunteers or not is utterly unpredictable and random (as would be the case if we were totally free and the world was undetermined). Most of us would accept that there are reasons or causal factors why someone may feel impelled to volunteer. It's for this reason, I think, we're intrigued by the question about what motivates us to volunteer. We do accept a degree of determinism in our way of viewing volunteering.

Many of us almost unconsciously have adopted a position that philosophers would call compatibilism in the way we think about volunteering. That's to say,. we believe that these two ways of viewing volunteering are compatible; determinism is compatible with free will. That is, we believe there are factors that can help determine volunteering and that this is compatible with believing we get a real choice about whether we volunteer or not and that we can make a difference.

Volunteering's a belief

In a compatibilist account, the real significance of volunteering is the sense in which it is a very tangible expression of the belief we have as humans: that we can make a difference and that our actions have consequences. Members of religious groups that believe in predestination, have the psychological incentive to act graciously as it provides a kind of tangible evidence that the individual is predestined to go to heaven.

In this way, by volunteering we could be said to be voting with our feet on the moot question about whether we can make a real difference on the social issues we align ourselves with. In lieu of proof that we live in a free and undetermined world, acting as if it is, is the best way of ensuring it comes about. The compatibilist card we play as volunteers, is to say that whether the world is or isn't determined is irrelevant to why we volunteer.

The volunteer manager's paradox

However, as compatibilist philosophers have found, nagging doubts remain. In the case of volunteering, we often come up against this issue in its most acute form when it comes to accounting for ourselves in front of our funders and supporters. How can we be sure that our actions can be traced to actual outcomes? How has the volunteering we built based on nothing but the free will of certain individuals determined a range of solid outcomes that can be precisely measured? This and other paradoxes are the bread and butter of volunteer managers.

So next time, as a volunteer manager, you're faced with reporting to a funder asking about how many volunteers you recruit and what impact they've made, remember you're not alone. In fact, you are in excellent company. Some of the greatest minds of all time have struggled with exactly the same issue.

No more redefinitions

My serious point is that we should begin to look again at the bigger picture. We're past the point of needing to constantly redefine what we mean by volunteering and question our identity as a community or movement or sector. Volunteering is mature enough as an idea for its value and sense of worth to be accepted by society. It's time we started exploring the links and roots behind volunteering wherever that may take us -whether or not it happens to be clearly delineated and demarcated :-).

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Original post: http://jocote.org/2011/05/beyond-our-grasp/