Lettica Hustinx
Biographic Data
| ID | 106368 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lettica Hustinx |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lettica |
| FAMILY NAME | Hustinx |
| SIGNATURE | HUSTINX L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ghent University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1888-7300 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 315 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Politics of diversity in the framing of blood donation: The in-and exclusion of racially minoritised blood donors on blood agency websites in Belgium and the United Kingdom
Second-hand clothes, first-hand mindset: A wardrobe study of higher-education student clothing practice
The study explores motivations for second-hand clothing practices using wardrobe interviews with a limited sample of twelve higher-education students in Belgium. Three types of practices were identified: bargain hunters, uniqueness searchers and ethical and ecological buyers. The study reveals that despite the perceived sustainability of second-hand clothes, these practices often result in large volumes of clothing purchases, contradicting sustai…
Paradoxes Within the Management of Volunteers
While scholars of management have extensively discussed paradoxes, scholars of volunteer management have given them little systematic attention. This special issue brings together the field of paradox studies with the research field of volunteer management. While many studies highlight paradoxes between different “missions” and mandates within volunteer-involving organizations, this introduction suggests using a “dramaturgical” approach that high…
Inequality in Volunteering: Building a New Research Front
Volunteering research focuses predominantly on predicting participation in volunteering, proceeding from the quasi-hegemonic foundation of resource theory and dominant-status theory. Empirical research in this tradition has provided extremely robust evidence that dominant groups in society are more likely to volunteer. At the same time, it has reinforced the status quo in the production of knowledge on volunteering, thereby neglecting the clear p…
Missing minorities” in blood donation: Rethinking blood procurement in Europe as a citizenship regime
Although European blood collection organizations are currently obtaining sufficient and safe blood from the majority population, they report having difficulty recruiting first and second-generation immigrants from non-European countries. Most existing studies on these underrepresented groups, who have been coined the “ missing minorities” in blood donation, have adopted an instrumental approach that focuses on the development of targeted recruitm…
Negotiating risk-group categorization and the co-production of blood safety: The evolution of sociotechnical imaginaries mobilized in the public debate on the deferral of men who have sex with men as …
The Organizational Field of Blood Collection: A Multilevel Analysis of Organizational Determinants of Blood Donation in Europe
Maintaining an adequate blood supply for transfusion poses a pressing challenge to society. We argue that this challenge has not been adequately addressed in previous research. Building upon Healy’s seminal work on ‘blood-collection regimes’ and the subsequent shift towards a field-level approach that broadens the analytical focus beyond the dyadic relationship between donors and organizations, we embed the act of blood donation within the organi…
The 'affective liminality' of young immigrants in Belgium: From Ruly to Unruly Feelings on the Path Towards Formal Citizenship
This paper focuses on affective citizenship amongst young immigrants without formal citizenship. Citizenship studies use the ‘affective turn’ to address the central role of affect in current integration and citizenship policies of many Western nation-states, but the lived affective experiences of new immigrants without formal citizenship status concerning these policies remain poorly understood. We advance an analytical framework of ‘affective li…
Blood’s ontologies-entangled: Qualitative inquiry into the enactment, representation, and organizational modes of coordination of blood’s multiplicity in a Belgian blood establishment
Since British sociologist Titmuss authoritatively conceived blood donation as an altruistic ‘gift relationship’, blood establishments have adopted blood’s highly symbolic status as a core professional belief. However, important developments since the 1970s have resulted in blood’s bio-objectification, making blood a renewed object of concern. Because different versions of this bio-object are simultaneously present and interfere with one another, …
The labyrinth towards citizenship: Contradictions in the framing and categorization of immigrants in immigration and integration policies
Restrictive policies in Europe are accompanied by exclusionary discourses concerning national citizenship for immigrants, depicting them dichotomously as either ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’. In our analysis of immigration and integration policies in Belgium, we focus on how these political discourses interact to differentiate between categories of immigrants who are included or excluded to some extent in ways that are more complex than the dichot…
How do Human Rights Fit into the Debate? The Representation and Frames of Social Movement Organizations in a Newspaper Debate on the 2010 French Eviction and Expulsion of Roma Migrants
This paper analyzes the representation of social movement organizations (SMOs) and the frames to which they are linked in a newspaper debate developing after a specific human-rights violation. This analysis is intended to demonstrate how research on social movements and human-rights frames and research on the access of NGOs to the media can complement each other in the investigation of mediated human-rights debates. The violation addressed in thi…
Opening Up the “Black Box” of “Volunteering”: On Hybridization and Purification in Volunteering Research and Promotion
The scholarly exploration of “volunteering” has mainly focused on identifying its antecedents or consequences, in order to facilitate the management and promotion of volunteering. In this dominant stream of research, the phenomenon of volunteering thus remains a “black box”—a taken-for-granted and fixed reality. The article sets out to open the black box of “volunteering” by not accepting it as a fixed, unproblematic object, but by exploring volu…
Civil Anarchizing for the Common Good: Culturally Patterned Politics of Legitimacy in the Climate Justice Movement
This article presents an ethnographic study of the case of Ende Gelände (EG), a German civil disobedience network undertaking action for climate justice. We reveal how a politics of legitimacy in civil society organizations such as EG are structured and constructed through different styles of civic action. Specifically, in our case study, a dominant pattern of “ civil anarchizing ” (CA) emerged, in which legitimacy was continuously negotiated in …
Modalities of agency in a corporate volunteering program: Cultivating a resource of neoliberal governmentality
Recent scholarly discussions on agency relate the concept to privilege, affect and subject formation, while challenging its equation with resistance to structural limitations. This article utilizes these discussions in a new terrain of ethnographic exploration: the engagement of corporate volunteers with underprivileged youth, coordinated by a transnational nonprofit that relies on corporate sponsorship. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic study …
Settling the Neoliberal Contradiction through Corporate Volunteering: Governing Employees in the Era of Cognitive Capitalism
Corporations are increasingly interested in promoting corporate volunteering, and their efforts are aligned with supportive nonprofits and public policies. The article seeks to understand the reasons for this growing interest. It is based on insights from an ethnographic exploration of corporate volunteering activities in a transnational nonprofit that involves highly skilled corporate volunteers in its programs of entrepreneurship education. A m…
The Relative Power of Negativity: The Influence of Language Intensity on Perceived Strength
Negative utterances and words have been found to be stronger than positive utterances and words, but what happens if positive and negative utterances are intensified? Two online experiments were carried out in which participants judged the strength of (un)intensified positive and negative evaluations in written dialogues. Both studies showed intensified language was perceived as stronger than unmarked language (i.e., language that was not intensi…
A new spirit across sectors: Constructing a common justification for corporate volunteering
Corporate volunteering is an activity located at the intersection of the corporate and nonprofit spheres. Its coordination and implementation create interesting encounters between professionals from both sectors. This article adopts a pragmatic sociological approach to analysing the discursive processes that nurture or hinder these encounters and the corporate volunteering activities they aim to produce. It brings to the fore the nonprofit perspe…
Fairtradization: A Performative Perspective on Fair Trade Markets and the Role of Retail Settings in Their Enactment
In line with the Callonian approach in economic sociology, this paper introduces the concept of "fairtradization" to analyze the assemblages of human agents, material devices, and discourses through which the fair trade market is enacted. We argue that the retail setting is a key site for the enactment of particular versions of "fair trade," focusing on a case study of the newly designed world shops in Flanders (Belgium). We reveal that the new s…
Placing the distant other on the shelf: An analysis and comparison of (fair trade) coffee packages in relation to commodity fetishism
Fair trade has been praised for 'de-fetishizing' commodities by providing consumers with information on the production of the commodity. Various empirical studies of fair trade marketing materials have generated critique of this vision. However, these focused on materials produced by engaged fair trade organizations. As the fair trade concept has entered the mainstream, fair trade products have found their way into supermarkets. In this setting, …
Religion and Volunteering: Complex, contested and ambiguous relationships
Religion is considered a key predictor of volunteering: the more religious people are, the more likely they are to volunteer. This positive association enjoys significant support in current research; in fact, it could be considered the ‘default perspective’ on the relationship between both phenomena. In this book, the authors claim that, although the dominant approach is legitimate and essential, it nonetheless falls short in grasping the full co…
Discourses of Roma Anti-Discrimination in Reports on Human Rights Violations
In an effort to understand the paradox between the expansion of inclusion projects for the Roma and their persisting exclusion, this article explores human rights practice in order to grasp the complexity of meanings of inclusion negotiated in this practice. In this way, we scrutinize whether there are limiting factors within the inclusionary discourse itself. Specifically, we analyze the discourse in transnational judicial, political and civil s…
Managing Hybridity in a Changing Welfare Mix: Everyday Practices in an Entrepreneurial Nonprofit in Belgium
This article departs from the observation of a widely heralded shift in the governance of welfare, which is claimed to represent a more complex and uncertain institutional environment for third sector organizations (TSOs). It has been argued that hybrid organizations carry innovative potential compared to traditional nonprofits in terms of more effectively or creatively dealing with contradictory pressures from multiple institutional logics. Usin…
Organisational Hybridity in a Post-Corporatist Welfare Mix: The Case of the Third Sector in Belgium
Although mixed public-private provisions of welfare have always been a typical characteristic of continental welfare states, recent international scholarship has pointed to a historically new process of institutional hybridisation, with a more systematic intermingling of rationalities of the state, market and third sector within one and the same organisation. In this article, we address two limitations in the current knowledge: first, the absence…
Volontiranje studenata u Zagrebu u komparativnom kontekstu
The paper presents an analysis of the results of the research of volunteering of students of the University of Zagreb and Technical and Social Sciences Polytechnics in Zagreb conducted between 2006-2007 within the international comparative research of students in 14 countries of the world. The aim of the research was to collect the data on various aspects of volunteering (experience, basic forms, motivations and benefits of volunteering, values c…
Student Volunteering in China and Canada: Comparative Perspectives
While many of the theoretical frameworks for volunteering have been developed and empirically tested in the west, our understanding of volunteering in non-Western countries, such as China, is relatively limited. Nevertheless, in recent decades enormous efforts have been made by the Chinese government to encourage and support volunteering among its citizens, especially youth. Chinese youth are volunteering in greater numbers in response to these i…
Navigating Theories of Volunteering: A Hybrid Map for a Complex Phenomenon
The study of volunteerism has generated multiple conceptual frameworks yet no integrated theory has emerged.This article identifies three major challenges, or layers of complexity, that a unified theory of volunteering faces.First, volunteering is a complex phenomenon that has permeable boundaries and spans a wide variety of activities, organizations, and sectors.Second, different disciplines attribute different meanings and functions to voluntee…
When is Statistical Evidence Superior to Anecdotal Evidence in Supporting Probability Claims? The Role of Argument Type
Under certain conditions, statistical evidence is more persuasive than anecdotal evidence in supporting a claim about the probability that a certain event will occur. In three experiments, it is shown that the type of argument is an important condition in this respect. If the evidence is part of an argument by generalization, statistical evidence is more persuasive compared with anecdotal evidence (Experiments 1 and 2). In the case of argument by…
Inequality in Volunteering: Building a New Research Front
Volunteering research focuses predominantly on predicting participation in volunteering, proceeding from the quasi-hegemonic foundation of resource theory and dominant-status theory. Empirical research in this tradition has provided extremely robust evidence that dominant groups in society are more likely to volunteer. At the same time, it has reinforced the status quo in the production of knowledge on volunteering, thereby neglecting the clear p…
Monitorial Citizens or Civic Omnivores? Repertoires of Civic Participation Among University Students
In present-day societies, the extent to which young people still participate in civic life is an important matter of concern. The claim of a generational 'decline' in civic engagement has been contested, and interchanged with the notion of a 'replacement' of traditional engagement by new types of participation, and the emergence of the 'monitorial citizen' who participates in more individualized ways. Concurrently, this study explored the assumpt…
What Money Cannot Buy: The Distinctive and Multidimensional Impact of Volunteers
Although it is assumed that volunteers make an extremely important contribution to organizations and the community, studies that examine their direct impact are scarce. Using quantitative and qualitative data collected from clients, volunteers and staff at the Philadelphia Ronald McDonald House, examined is the impact of volunteers on the organization, the clients and on themselves. Volunteers had a high direct and indirect impact on recipients, …
Social and Cultural Origins of Motivations to Volunteer: A Comparison of University Students in Six Countries
Although participation in volunteering and motivations to volunteer (MTV) have received substantial attention on the national level, particularly in the US, few studies have compared and explained these issues across cultural and political contexts. This study compares how two theoretical perspectives, social origins theory and signalling theory, explain variations in MTV across different countries. The study analyses responses from a sample of 5…
Weakening Organizational Ties? A Classification of Styles of Volunteering in the Flemish Red Cross
This article presents an initial empirical assessment of a new analytical framework of styles of volunteering (SOV). The framework suggests that volunteering can be categorized in terms of a multidimensional set of cultural and structural indicators that cohere in systematic and varying ways. With data drawn from a survey of 652 Flemish Red Cross volunteers, a multivariate analysis reveals five different SOV categories of volunteers: episodic con…
Opening Up the “Black Box” of “Volunteering”: On Hybridization and Purification in Volunteering Research and Promotion
The scholarly exploration of “volunteering” has mainly focused on identifying its antecedents or consequences, in order to facilitate the management and promotion of volunteering. In this dominant stream of research, the phenomenon of volunteering thus remains a “black box”—a taken-for-granted and fixed reality. The article sets out to open the black box of “volunteering” by not accepting it as a fixed, unproblematic object, but by exploring volu…
The Third-party Model: Enhancing Volunteering through Governments, Corporations and Educational Institutes
Volunteering is perceived as important for creating social capital and civil society, and therefore has become a fundamental part of social policies across most Western countries. In this article, we examine the involvement of governments, corporations and educational institutes in encouraging volunteering, and pinpoint their role in developing volunteering circles. Based on essential concepts presented here (volunteerability and recruitability),…
Modalities of agency in a corporate volunteering program: Cultivating a resource of neoliberal governmentality
Recent scholarly discussions on agency relate the concept to privilege, affect and subject formation, while challenging its equation with resistance to structural limitations. This article utilizes these discussions in a new terrain of ethnographic exploration: the engagement of corporate volunteers with underprivileged youth, coordinated by a transnational nonprofit that relies on corporate sponsorship. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic study …
Students’ Vocational Choices and Voluntary Action: A 12-Nation Study
Previous research on student involvement suggested that business and engineering students manifest lowest rates of voluntary action. Similarly, it was thought that social science students are the most involved in voluntary action, with students of natural sciences and humanities in the middle. However, there were very few studies that empirically compared these assertions. Furthermore, these assertions were not investigated from cross-cultural pe…
The Relative Power of Negativity: The Influence of Language Intensity on Perceived Strength
Negative utterances and words have been found to be stronger than positive utterances and words, but what happens if positive and negative utterances are intensified? Two online experiments were carried out in which participants judged the strength of (un)intensified positive and negative evaluations in written dialogues. Both studies showed intensified language was perceived as stronger than unmarked language (i.e., language that was not intensi…
Cultural Values and Volunteering: A Cross-cultural Comparison of Students’ Motivation to Volunteer in 13 Countries
Managing Hybridity in a Changing Welfare Mix: Everyday Practices in an Entrepreneurial Nonprofit in Belgium
This article departs from the observation of a widely heralded shift in the governance of welfare, which is claimed to represent a more complex and uncertain institutional environment for third sector organizations (TSOs). It has been argued that hybrid organizations carry innovative potential compared to traditional nonprofits in terms of more effectively or creatively dealing with contradictory pressures from multiple institutional logics. Usin…
Student Volunteering in China and Canada: Comparative Perspectives
While many of the theoretical frameworks for volunteering have been developed and empirically tested in the west, our understanding of volunteering in non-Western countries, such as China, is relatively limited. Nevertheless, in recent decades enormous efforts have been made by the Chinese government to encourage and support volunteering among its citizens, especially youth. Chinese youth are volunteering in greater numbers in response to these i…
Institutionally Individualized Volunteering: Towards a Late Modern Re-Construction
In this article, it is argued that the ongoing debate on new and more individualized forms of volunteering is too one-sidedly focused on the processes of de-structuration and de-institutionalization. Individualization is a complex and ambivalent macro-structural process towards ‘institutionally dependent individual situations’. To fully understand the emerging forms of volunteering, we thus need to ‘reconstruct beyond de-construction’. The concep…
Civil Anarchizing for the Common Good: Culturally Patterned Politics of Legitimacy in the Climate Justice Movement
This article presents an ethnographic study of the case of Ende Gelände (EG), a German civil disobedience network undertaking action for climate justice. We reveal how a politics of legitimacy in civil society organizations such as EG are structured and constructed through different styles of civic action. Specifically, in our case study, a dominant pattern of “ civil anarchizing ” (CA) emerged, in which legitimacy was continuously negotiated in …
Civic Involvement and Modernization
This paper investigates how broad processes of modernization affect individuals' relations to the civil sphere. It first introduces a model of civic involvement as a system of expectations between participants and associations. Next, the issue of change is explored. It is argued that recent social transformations, such as individualization, globalization and technology changes, undermine classic notions of civil society participation. Old types o…
Fairtradization: A Performative Perspective on Fair Trade Markets and the Role of Retail Settings in Their Enactment
In line with the Callonian approach in economic sociology, this paper introduces the concept of "fairtradization" to analyze the assemblages of human agents, material devices, and discourses through which the fair trade market is enacted. We argue that the retail setting is a key site for the enactment of particular versions of "fair trade," focusing on a case study of the newly designed world shops in Flanders (Belgium). We reveal that the new s…
Settling the Neoliberal Contradiction through Corporate Volunteering: Governing Employees in the Era of Cognitive Capitalism
Corporations are increasingly interested in promoting corporate volunteering, and their efforts are aligned with supportive nonprofits and public policies. The article seeks to understand the reasons for this growing interest. It is based on insights from an ethnographic exploration of corporate volunteering activities in a transnational nonprofit that involves highly skilled corporate volunteers in its programs of entrepreneurship education. A m…
Bifurcated commitment, priorities, and social contagion: The dynamics and correlates of volunteering within a university student population
In spite of a progressive institutionalisation of community‐based learning into higher education, relatively little is known about the actual dynamics and correlates of volunteering by students. The study presented seeks a more in‐depth understanding of the spontaneous, extracurricular involvement within a university student population. Data are drawn from a postal survey of a representative sample of third‐year university students enrolled at a …
Organisational Hybridity in a Post-Corporatist Welfare Mix: The Case of the Third Sector in Belgium
Although mixed public-private provisions of welfare have always been a typical characteristic of continental welfare states, recent international scholarship has pointed to a historically new process of institutional hybridisation, with a more systematic intermingling of rationalities of the state, market and third sector within one and the same organisation. In this article, we address two limitations in the current knowledge: first, the absence…
What gives? Cross-national differences in students’ giving behavior
This study is targeted to understanding the giving of time and money among a specific cohort – university students across 13 countries. It explores predictors of different combinations of giving behaviors: only volunteering, only donating, neither, as compared to doing both. Among the predictors of these four types of giving behavior, we also account for cross-national differences across models of civil society. The findings show that students pr…
Brave New Volunteers? The Value of Paid and Unpaid Work for Flemish Red Cross Volunteers
This paper considers the current debate on the changing position and meaning of paid work in Western societies. In the wake of a structural crisis of fulltime employment, a new role and potential is attributed to voluntary work. With data drawn from a survey of Red Cross volunteers in Flanders (Belgium), this research assesses empirically the value volunteers attach to paid and unpaid work and their disposition to combine paid and unpaid work mor…
The Organizational Field of Blood Collection: A Multilevel Analysis of Organizational Determinants of Blood Donation in Europe
Maintaining an adequate blood supply for transfusion poses a pressing challenge to society. We argue that this challenge has not been adequately addressed in previous research. Building upon Healy’s seminal work on ‘blood-collection regimes’ and the subsequent shift towards a field-level approach that broadens the analytical focus beyond the dyadic relationship between donors and organizations, we embed the act of blood donation within the organi…
Collective and Reflexive Styles of Volunteering: A Sociological Modernization Perspective
This paper presents a theory-guided examination of the (changing) nature of volunteering through the lens of sociological modernization theories. Existing accounts of qualitative changes in motivational bases and patterns of volunteering are interpreted against the background of broader, modernization-driven social-structural transformations. It is argued that volunteer involvement should be qualified as a biographically embedded reality, and a n…
Bifurcated commitment, priorities, and social contagion: The dynamics and correlates of volunteering within a university student population
In spite of a progressive institutionalisation of community‐based learning into higher education, relatively little is known about the actual dynamics and correlates of volunteering by students. The study presented seeks a more in‐depth understanding of the spontaneous, extracurricular involvement within a university student population. Data are drawn from a postal survey of a representative sample of third‐year university students enrolled at a …
Weakening Organizational Ties? A Classification of Styles of Volunteering in the Flemish Red Cross
This article presents an initial empirical assessment of a new analytical framework of styles of volunteering (SOV). The framework suggests that volunteering can be categorized in terms of a multidimensional set of cultural and structural indicators that cohere in systematic and varying ways. With data drawn from a survey of 652 Flemish Red Cross volunteers, a multivariate analysis reveals five different SOV categories of volunteers: episodic con…
Civic Involvement and Modernization
This paper investigates how broad processes of modernization affect individuals' relations to the civil sphere. It first introduces a model of civic involvement as a system of expectations between participants and associations. Next, the issue of change is explored. It is argued that recent social transformations, such as individualization, globalization and technology changes, undermine classic notions of civil society participation. Old types o…
Brave New Volunteers? The Value of Paid and Unpaid Work for Flemish Red Cross Volunteers
This paper considers the current debate on the changing position and meaning of paid work in Western societies. In the wake of a structural crisis of fulltime employment, a new role and potential is attributed to voluntary work. With data drawn from a survey of Red Cross volunteers in Flanders (Belgium), this research assesses empirically the value volunteers attach to paid and unpaid work and their disposition to combine paid and unpaid work mor…
Students’ Vocational Choices and Voluntary Action: A 12-Nation Study
Previous research on student involvement suggested that business and engineering students manifest lowest rates of voluntary action. Similarly, it was thought that social science students are the most involved in voluntary action, with students of natural sciences and humanities in the middle. However, there were very few studies that empirically compared these assertions. Furthermore, these assertions were not investigated from cross-cultural pe…
The ‘Black Box’ Problem in the Study of Participation
Research on citizen participation has been guided by two core issues: first, the observation of a widening repertory of modes of participation, and second, the argument that participation is not an undifferentiated phenomenon, but must be conceived as an inherently multidimensional reality. In this article, we argue that conventional participation research has focused too one-sidedly on quantitatively expanding the range of types of activities, w…
When is Statistical Evidence Superior to Anecdotal Evidence in Supporting Probability Claims? The Role of Argument Type
Under certain conditions, statistical evidence is more persuasive than anecdotal evidence in supporting a claim about the probability that a certain event will occur. In three experiments, it is shown that the type of argument is an important condition in this respect. If the evidence is part of an argument by generalization, statistical evidence is more persuasive compared with anecdotal evidence (Experiments 1 and 2). In the case of argument by…
A Cross-Cultural Examination of Student Volunteering: Is It All About Résumé Building?
This research adopts the utilitarian view of volunteering as a starting point: we posit that for an undergraduate student population volunteering is motivated by career enhancing and job prospects. We hypothesize that in those countries where volunteering signals positive characteristics of students and helps advance their careers, their volunteer participation will be higher. Furthermore, regardless of the signaling value of volunteering, those …
Institutionally Individualized Volunteering: Towards a Late Modern Re-Construction
In this article, it is argued that the ongoing debate on new and more individualized forms of volunteering is too one-sidedly focused on the processes of de-structuration and de-institutionalization. Individualization is a complex and ambivalent macro-structural process towards ‘institutionally dependent individual situations’. To fully understand the emerging forms of volunteering, we thus need to ‘reconstruct beyond de-construction’. The concep…
Navigating Theories of Volunteering: A Hybrid Map for a Complex Phenomenon
The study of volunteerism has generated multiple conceptual frameworks yet no integrated theory has emerged.This article identifies three major challenges, or layers of complexity, that a unified theory of volunteering faces.First, volunteering is a complex phenomenon that has permeable boundaries and spans a wide variety of activities, organizations, and sectors.Second, different disciplines attribute different meanings and functions to voluntee…
Social and Cultural Origins of Motivations to Volunteer: A Comparison of University Students in Six Countries
Although participation in volunteering and motivations to volunteer (MTV) have received substantial attention on the national level, particularly in the US, few studies have compared and explained these issues across cultural and political contexts. This study compares how two theoretical perspectives, social origins theory and signalling theory, explain variations in MTV across different countries. The study analyses responses from a sample of 5…
The Third-party Model: Enhancing Volunteering through Governments, Corporations and Educational Institutes
Volunteering is perceived as important for creating social capital and civil society, and therefore has become a fundamental part of social policies across most Western countries. In this article, we examine the involvement of governments, corporations and educational institutes in encouraging volunteering, and pinpoint their role in developing volunteering circles. Based on essential concepts presented here (volunteerability and recruitability),…
Cultural Values and Volunteering: A Cross-cultural Comparison of Students’ Motivation to Volunteer in 13 Countries
What gives? Cross-national differences in students’ giving behavior
This study is targeted to understanding the giving of time and money among a specific cohort – university students across 13 countries. It explores predictors of different combinations of giving behaviors: only volunteering, only donating, neither, as compared to doing both. Among the predictors of these four types of giving behavior, we also account for cross-national differences across models of civil society. The findings show that students pr…
What Money Cannot Buy: The Distinctive and Multidimensional Impact of Volunteers
Although it is assumed that volunteers make an extremely important contribution to organizations and the community, studies that examine their direct impact are scarce. Using quantitative and qualitative data collected from clients, volunteers and staff at the Philadelphia Ronald McDonald House, examined is the impact of volunteers on the organization, the clients and on themselves. Volunteers had a high direct and indirect impact on recipients, …
Volontiranje studenata u Zagrebu u komparativnom kontekstu
The paper presents an analysis of the results of the research of volunteering of students of the University of Zagreb and Technical and Social Sciences Polytechnics in Zagreb conducted between 2006-2007 within the international comparative research of students in 14 countries of the world. The aim of the research was to collect the data on various aspects of volunteering (experience, basic forms, motivations and benefits of volunteering, values c…
Student Volunteering in China and Canada: Comparative Perspectives
While many of the theoretical frameworks for volunteering have been developed and empirically tested in the west, our understanding of volunteering in non-Western countries, such as China, is relatively limited. Nevertheless, in recent decades enormous efforts have been made by the Chinese government to encourage and support volunteering among its citizens, especially youth. Chinese youth are volunteering in greater numbers in response to these i…
Monitorial Citizens or Civic Omnivores? Repertoires of Civic Participation Among University Students
In present-day societies, the extent to which young people still participate in civic life is an important matter of concern. The claim of a generational 'decline' in civic engagement has been contested, and interchanged with the notion of a 'replacement' of traditional engagement by new types of participation, and the emergence of the 'monitorial citizen' who participates in more individualized ways. Concurrently, this study explored the assumpt…
Organisational Hybridity in a Post-Corporatist Welfare Mix: The Case of the Third Sector in Belgium
Although mixed public-private provisions of welfare have always been a typical characteristic of continental welfare states, recent international scholarship has pointed to a historically new process of institutional hybridisation, with a more systematic intermingling of rationalities of the state, market and third sector within one and the same organisation. In this article, we address two limitations in the current knowledge: first, the absence…
Religion and Volunteering: Complex, contested and ambiguous relationships
Religion is considered a key predictor of volunteering: the more religious people are, the more likely they are to volunteer. This positive association enjoys significant support in current research; in fact, it could be considered the ‘default perspective’ on the relationship between both phenomena. In this book, the authors claim that, although the dominant approach is legitimate and essential, it nonetheless falls short in grasping the full co…
Discourses of Roma Anti-Discrimination in Reports on Human Rights Violations
In an effort to understand the paradox between the expansion of inclusion projects for the Roma and their persisting exclusion, this article explores human rights practice in order to grasp the complexity of meanings of inclusion negotiated in this practice. In this way, we scrutinize whether there are limiting factors within the inclusionary discourse itself. Specifically, we analyze the discourse in transnational judicial, political and civil s…
Managing Hybridity in a Changing Welfare Mix: Everyday Practices in an Entrepreneurial Nonprofit in Belgium
This article departs from the observation of a widely heralded shift in the governance of welfare, which is claimed to represent a more complex and uncertain institutional environment for third sector organizations (TSOs). It has been argued that hybrid organizations carry innovative potential compared to traditional nonprofits in terms of more effectively or creatively dealing with contradictory pressures from multiple institutional logics. Usin…
Placing the distant other on the shelf: An analysis and comparison of (fair trade) coffee packages in relation to commodity fetishism
Fair trade has been praised for 'de-fetishizing' commodities by providing consumers with information on the production of the commodity. Various empirical studies of fair trade marketing materials have generated critique of this vision. However, these focused on materials produced by engaged fair trade organizations. As the fair trade concept has entered the mainstream, fair trade products have found their way into supermarkets. In this setting, …
Fairtradization: A Performative Perspective on Fair Trade Markets and the Role of Retail Settings in Their Enactment
In line with the Callonian approach in economic sociology, this paper introduces the concept of "fairtradization" to analyze the assemblages of human agents, material devices, and discourses through which the fair trade market is enacted. We argue that the retail setting is a key site for the enactment of particular versions of "fair trade," focusing on a case study of the newly designed world shops in Flanders (Belgium). We reveal that the new s…
Sociology (32 works) · Political science (30 works) · Nonprofit Sector and Volunteering (25 works) · Tourism, Volunteerism, and Development (19 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Politics (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Public relations (14 works) · Social Capital and Networks (13 works)