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.
This multidisciplinary book also provides tools and inspiration for practitioners and policy-makers for better supporting the social policy?.
Riccardo Guidi,
BA/MA in Political Science and PhD in Sociology, is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science of University of Pisa where currently teaches Organization of Social Services and Sociology of Third Sector. He gave lectures at the National Technical University of Athens (Greece), Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) and Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences (Latvia), chaired Sessions, presented and discussed Papers at ISTR, ISA, ESPANET, ECPR, ESWRA and IPA Conferences. Formerly, he was Scientific Director and Senior Researcher of Volunteering and Participation Foundation (Italy) (2009-2014). His research interests are about volunteering, sustainable community movement organizations and social work. About these topics he has published monographies and edited books, journal articles, and book chapters.
Ksenija Fonovic,
BA/MRes, works with CSV Lazio - regional Volunteer Support Centre based in Rome, Italy. She spearheaded efforts to promote the implementation of the ILO Manual for the Measurement of Volunteer Work through EVMP – European Volunteer Measurement Project in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. She was responsible for stakeholders’ engagement in the three-year EU funded research project “Third Sector Impact” coordinated by Bernard Enjolras. She coordinated a collaborative practice led research “Volunteering across Europe. Organisations, promotion, participation” and edited the collection of country reports in English and in Italian. She contributed to various European civil society projects resulting in policy recommendations. Since 2018, PhD candidate at the University of Münster with Prof. Annette Zimmer.
Tania Cappadozzi,
BSc/MSc in Statistics, is Executive officer in the Division for population register, demographic and living conditions statistics of the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). Since 2009 she is the Unit Chief of the Italian Time Use Survey and since 2011 she is the Scientific Responsible and Unit Chief of the ILO Module on voluntary work (Unpaid activities of benefit to others). Her research activities concern, in particular, unpaid work: both household work and volunteer work. She is a member of the UN Expert Working Group on the revision of ICATUS, member of the UNECE Task Force on Valuing Unpaid Household Service, member of the Eurostat Task Force for reviewing the EU Time Use Guidelines 2020 and of the Istat Consultative Committee on the permanent Census of Non Profit Institutions.
