Public policies have been predicated on a prominent role for voluntary action which has been justified on the grounds that communities are best placed to identify and meet immediate local needs. However, a review of literature on the topic shows that while there is acknowledgement of community-level variations in volunteering, there is a need for a better understanding of those variations. In particular, this chapter shows that there has been little acknowledgement of the persistent gradients between communities in volunteering or of the strength of the association between volunteering levels and community prosperity or disadvantage. With the current emphasis on social capital as a key element in community renewal, we need to understand the extent to which geographic context influences volunteering and the mechanisms through which it might do so. This chapter first explains why there might be reasons to expect variations between communities in the proportions of their residents engaged in voluntary action. Then it describes the scale of variations, initially by deploying large-scale datasets and cross-referencing volunteering rates against measures of socioeconomic characteristics. This is followed by an overview of the results of analyses which have sought to separate out genuinely contextual effects on volunteering – in other words, influences that are not simply a result of variations in the mix of individuals between communities.

The focus in this chapter is on volunteering trajectories over time: moves into and out of voluntary action over time and the reasons that underlie these transitions. There are different ways of understanding such patterns of behaviour. One approach is to postulate that there are some individuals who have inculcated a habit of service – that is, a disposition which means that they are more likely to engage. An alternative, which is more consistent with the approach taken in this book, is to look at the circumstances which enable and constrain engagement – circumstances such as education, family background, employment and retirement, which are also prone to change over time. Such changes cause individuals to re-evaluate their priorities, provide them with more (or fewer) of the resources that sustain participation or contribute to changes in their values and attitudes. Alternatively, such circumstances (e.g. large-scale unemployment) can sever those connections, with visible civic penalties visible decades later. This chapter considers evidence from longitudinal UK studies in which people have been asked to record (sometimes contemporaneously, sometimes retrospectively) various dimensions of participation. These studies have facilitated sophisticated quantitative work on the influences of changing individual, household and personal circumstances on patterns of engagement. The chapter also considers several qualitative studies of how people describe the relationship between their changing life circumstances and trajectories of engagement in voluntary action.

Just as romances and their readers have been treated as objects of derision and contempt, so soap operas and their viewers have had a hostile response from cultural critics. Indeed, even the pioneers of cultural studies, such as Raymond Williams, who wished to treat popular culture as worthy of serious analysis, found it easy to dismiss soap opera. The turn to soap operas by feminist critics can be situated within a wider debate about femininity and 'feminine genres' within feminist television criticism. For Brunsdon and Geraghty, soaps have a particular appeal to women because of their concentration on the spheres and skills traditionally aligned with femininity. The study of soaps has not only analysed how texts with 'feminine' characteristics might offer something to women within a patriarchal society, but also the ways in which female audiences make use of these texts to cope with the experience of living under patriarchy.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted economic and social dislocation in a manner unprecedented in recent history. It was also associated with an upsurge in engagement in volunteering. However, the extent to which that upsurge has been sustained is questionable and this chapter reviews the best available evidence on this topic. First, there are large-scale national surveys of individuals, which enable us to consider whether there was an aggregate change, whether it was sustained and whether those involved were new to volunteering. Second, there are organisation-level data from the returns of voluntary organisations to regulators. Third, was COVID-19 associated with a switch in the character of volunteering, from formal volunteering in organisational settings to informal volunteering of a direct, interpersonal kind, characterised in some quarters as a resurgence of mutual aid? Finally, there are longitudinal studies of individuals, which enable tracking of whether individuals involved in Covid-related volunteering were new to the activity or not, and whether or not they sustained their involvement after the immediate first waves of the pandemic. Within a long-term context of steady decline in volunteering, the effects of COVID-19 do not seem to have been the promotion of a generalised increase in engagement. Rather, the socioeconomic characteristics of those most likely to be involved remain similar to those revealed by extensive previous research on volunteering.

This chapter introduces debates about consumer cultures, shopping, domestic consumption and lifestyle. It explores work which considers how consumption is not simply a process in which commodities are bought but also how they are 'given meaning through their active incorporation in people's lives'. The chapter isolates three debates about gender and consumption in different historical formations of consumer culture: late-nineteenth-century modernity, mid-twentieth-century Fordism, and late-twentieth-century post-Fordism. It explores debates about the department store as a 'feminine space' within the masculine 'public' sphere. The chapter considers how women consumed housing and used consumer goods to create a sense of 'home' and to articulate gendered identities in the post-war period in the UK. It also examines debates about gender, identity and contemporary consumer cultures, and explores how the design of material culture in the 1950s tried to produce a particular form of femininity epitomised by the figure of the rational, scientific housewife.

There are good reasons to be concerned about diversity in the voluntary sector. Organisations reasonably believe that they are more likely to be effective in their activities if they can recruit volunteers who are similar to the people they are supporting, especially if they share lived experience. Furthermore, given the widespread belief that volunteering offers a potential range of benefits to those who undertake it, it is desirable that inequalities in participation should be reduced. Yet stratification of British society was and remains highly salient. If voluntary action depends on the capacities of and resources available to individuals, then we would expect socioeconomic stratification in the volunteer population. This chapter begins by exploring the main strands on the existing literature on socioeconomic inequalities in voluntary action. Then there is a summary of large-scale analyses of UK survey datasets iing the past three decades, including an extension and updating of previous analyses of survey data on variations in volunteering. A distinction is made between formal and informal volunteering – namely, voluntary effort contributed in structured (‘formal’) organisational settings and that which takes place outwith such contexts, entailing direct person-to-person support in the community (‘informal’ volunteering). Then, considering only formal volunteering, the chapter illustrates the diversity of organisational context in which volunteers operate – people select into types of organisation, and as a result we would expect to see different types of people involved in different types of organisation. Finally, there is also diversity in terms of the nature of the voluntary activities undertaken.

The UK has a relatively high and stable rate of engagement in volunteering, but most analyses focus on the rate of engagement, while little has been said about the level of actual effort or contribution made (money donated, hours of volunteering undertaken) or about the overlaps between those aspects of prosocial behaviours. This chapter illustrates the distribution of voluntary effort across the population and identifies a ‘core’ of individuals who make the largest contributions. Complementing this, there is also a discussion of what evidence there is for total non-engagement. Just as the likelihood of engagement in volunteering is socio-economically stratified, there is also evidence of social gradients in levels of engagement; prosperous, educated and employed individuals are not only more likely to volunteer or donate money but they are also likely to contribute more to the collective effort. The analysis considers the characteristics and distribution of primary contributors to formal and informal volunteering and charitable giving, separately and in combination. The converse of a core is a periphery, so for a complete contrast, the second part of the chapter flips the narrative and concentrates on the extent to which there is evidence of no engagement in these behaviours whatsoever. This section draws on longitudinal qualitative and quantitative datasets which allow researchers to reconstruct the volunteering trajectories of individuals for significant parts of their lives. As with investigations into other aspects of volunteering, what we find depends on where we look: there is less to non-engagement than appears at first sight.

This chapter brings together debates about the relationships between feminism and popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s which explored how feminism was envisaged within popular culture. These debates are organised around concepts such as 'backlash', 'post-feminism', 'celebrity feminism' and 'popular feminism'. The chapter reflects on what is at stake in feminism's engagement with popular culture, and on how feminists have made distinctions between the 'good' and the 'bad', the 'progressive' and the 'reactionary'. It examines forms of feminist cultural politics that are premised on an engagement with 'the popular'. The chapter considers forms of 'popular feminism' that, in different ways, question some of the assumptions and authority of 'official' forms of feminism. It explores a couple of studies that demonstrate why women may choose to make alliances with many feminist concerns but refuse the identity 'feminist'.

While popular music has been seen as an important element of youth cultures, the study of pop has become an increasingly dynamic field in its own right. This chapter analyses why many studies of youth and pop have been blind both to questions about gender and to feminist concerns, and examines the work of critics who have made an intervention in these fields. It examines work on youth subcultures within cultural studies. The chapter explores the work of feminist critics (in particular, Angela McRobbie) who have analysed how feminine identities are constructed and negotiated in girls' magazines and the extent to which these magazines have changed since the 1960s. It examines debates about whether pop songs reproduce gender inequalities or whether women's use of pop might be empowering. The chapter also considers the relationships between women's music-making and feminism.

Romantic fiction is the genre that tends to be most commonly associated with women. This chapter shows that, for feminists, romantic fiction was politically dangerous, a mechanism through which patriarchal culture was reproduced: women were fed fantasies of true love, fantasies which most women were seen to unquestioningly accept. Janice Radway's Reading the Romance demonstrates that in order to understand the meaning and significance of romance, it is necessary to analyse the complex relations between publishing industries, romance texts and romance readers. Approaches to romantic fiction have developed differently to approaches to the woman's film within film studies. The chapter discusses a range of ideas about the characteristics of romantic fiction and romance readers. It explores why romantic fiction has a particular appeal for women, while also considering the particular pleasures of the romance and the often uneasy relationship between feminism, romances and their reader.

How does the public respond to requests to engage in volunteering? Governments have repeatedly made such requests but volunteering rates remain relatively stable. To understand why this is so we need to understand public attitudes to volunteering and the influence of changing economic circumstances on the capacities and willingness of citizens to engage. The chapter first considers the relatively small number of robust national surveys about attitudes to voluntary action and also evidence of retirement intentions from longitudinal surveys. These offer interesting insights, though the somewhat negative message of the latter is that volunteering is largely absent from the imagined futures of most respondents. Economic circumstances have fluctuated in the UK in recent decades, and there is strong evidence as to the adverse effects on engagement. The chapter considers quantitative studies of the constraints imposed by economic circumstances on voluntary action and qualitative biographical evidence from individuals. These combine to paint a clear picture of the negative effects of economic adversity on volunteering. Finally, there is a discussion of studies of how people respond to requests to engage and the views that people have about their experience of volunteering. While there may be a reserve of a willingness to volunteer, whether that willingness is activated depends very much on the context of the appeal and the circumstances of individuals. Finally, volunteering is something that we do not enjoy as much as we used to, as shown by a comparison of evidence from the mid-1980s and 2015.

In recent decades, high levels of unemployment, and the growing evidence of precarity and casualization of existing employment opportunities, have stimulated interest in the contribution that volunteering might make to the pursuit of ‘employability’: an individual’s ability to move into and maintain employment and advance within the labour market. The chapter begins with an overview of efforts in Britain to develop programmes that encourage people to volunteer, with the aim of enhancing their employability and increasing their chances of securing paid work. Consideration is then given to the evidence base on the strength of the connections between volunteering and employability. The evidence base ranges in quality from many small-scale studies featuring self-reports by individuals, through narrowly defined programme evaluations, to quasi-experimental longitudinal analyses. The benefits of volunteering for employability are limited, stratified and contextual. Given this, it may not be surprising to disi, from studies of how individuals and organisations engage with volunteering initiatives that are designed to promote their employability, that the outcomes of those initiatives are contingent and partial and may result in frustrated expectations. There is a particular focus on evidence regarding young people, since these (especially young school leavers with few or no qualifications) are a core target group for volunteering initiatives. Finally, in light of the limited positive evidence in relation to the instrumental benefits of volunteering for employability, the chapter considers a recent argument that a justification for the use of volunteering to address unemployment may be found in its contribution to self-respect.

This book considers three principal examples of beneficial impacts of volunteering: the effects claimed for it on employability, health and political participation respectively. Assessing these impacts raises several generic issues, which are considered here. First, there is a consideration of the mechanisms through which volunteering might affect these outcomes, paying due attention to the diversity of voluntary action and the range of activities and settings that it encompasses. Given that volunteering is such a diverse phenomenon, whether any and all voluntary activities definitively have beneficial impacts is questionable. There is also a broader question about the quasi-pharmacological approach that essentially prescribes volunteering as a solution that can be prescribed to resolve a problem. Can we really be confident that if we ‘prescribe’ engagement, it will benefit people in the way that we expect of prescription drugs? The challenges associated with the measurement of impact of volunteering are then considered. There is a hierarchy of evidence: it is often believed that volunteering has positive outcomes for individuals but mostly such results follow from self-reports by individuals at one point in time. Longitudinal surveys with appropriate outcomes allow us to get some purchase on the effects of volunteering. Finally, there are analytical issues. Individuals cannot be prescribed (mandated) to undertake volunteering, generating problems such as selection bias (volunteers are not generally typical of the population) and reverse causation (improved health leads to volunteering, rather than volunteering leading to improved health).