The world of voluntary action is a complex one. Scholars in the field study actions by individuals that are not reducible to considerations of financial return or personal gain, and organisations that occupy hybrid spaces in the interstices between communities, markets and states. We may expect relatively straightforward results from commercial or statutory organisations – goods supplied at market prices to those who can pay for them, or services delivered on a consistent basis to those in need of them. What we expect of voluntary organisations is much less clear: we expect them to provide direct benefits, certainly, but also latent and indirect ones in the form of benefits to society such as the promotion of social capital within communities. As Hogg and Dean observe, voluntary action is a difficult and complex field to investigate, straddling as it does the public and private spheres. It is therefore a field with a need for robust research that will offer clear and grounded insights.

Yet the field is one that to date has lacked a volume that brings together in one place a range of contributions from scholars researching voluntary action. That is the aim of the present edited collection. The chapters exemplify important challenges: the disjunctures between the academic and the common sense of everyday meanings of voluntary action by individuals; the complexities of relationships between researcher and researched, in situations in which individuals may have little to gain directly from participation; the need to give voice to research participants while at the same time not resorting to uncritical, hagiographic accounts of individuals struggling against impossible odds.

Given the diversity of voluntary action and of the settings in which it takes place, the diversity of sources and methods within this collection is a key theme. The studies encompass combinations of survey and administrative data, regulatory returns and text from annual reports, visual methods, participant observation, archives and autobiographical accounts by individuals. The topics themselves are also highly diverse but they are united by a shared concern with private action for the public good. The relationships that this entails, the meanings that people attach to their actions and the expectations that society invests in voluntary action are complex, and they impose a requirement for contextually specific, sensitive and appropriate research methods.

The extent to which greater devolution in the UK has resulted in divergences in the development of voluntary action, and in the roles, resources and responsibilities of voluntary organisations, is a question on which we lack detailed empirical studies. Differences between the devolved administrations in terms of individual behaviours such as volunteering or charitable giving largely disappear, once allowance is made for individual and community characteristics. Comparisons of organisational populations and resources are to a degree occluded by regulatory differences seem more likely to be rooted in economic conditions in communities, rather than policy differences.

Consideration of such indicators only gets us so far, and studies are urgently needed of policy and practice in the voluntary sector in the devolved administrations. The position of civil society in Northern Ireland offers a crucial test case for the claims made for the voluntary sector's contribution to social development. This study by Hughes and Ketola is the first recent book-length treatment of such questions, and constitutes a highly original study of the place of voluntary action in the devolved administrations of the UK.

The voluntary sector in Northern Ireland has become a key agent in post-conflict reconstruction since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. But the burden of expectations placed upon civil society there was high well before that momentous event. Given the longstanding distrust of state institutions, communities understandably turned to voluntary organisations which, during the period of direct rule from Westminster, played a crucial role in the delivery of social programmes.

From 1998, Northern Ireland experienced what has been described as a ‘double transition’ towards peace, and towards neoliberalism. While post-conflict reconstruction led to very substantial influxes of funding for voluntary and community organisations, such beneficence was never expected to continue indefinitely. As a consequence, the reality has been one of partnerships between the voluntary sector and government. Hughes and Ketola's study has important insights to offer concerning the rhetoric and reality of partnerships between voluntary organisations and governments, and it also makes a significant contribution to debates about what has been characterised as a generic ‘partnership turn’ in the sector.

Overview

We opened this book with a quote from a Mass Observation Project (MOP) writer to the effect that the sheer scale of voluntary effort in Britain was so large that it would surprise ‘even the Prime Minister’. Many efforts have indeed been made to quantify this effort but what is even more important, we argue, is to understand the personal stories behind the aggregate statistics. We believe that the volume and quality of material from our group of MOP writers provides unparalleled insight into people's journeys into and through voluntary action, the nature of their contributions, their reasons for becoming involved, and their attitudes to the place of voluntary action. The material presented in Chapters Four to Eight provides highly novel insights into how voluntary action has changed (or not) in the period covered by this book.

In writing this book we were interested in the extent of continuity and change in voluntary action. The quantitative evidence is clear: our work on survey datasets covering the period from the early 1980s onwards amply demonstrates underlying stability (Chapter Four). Although no individual social survey has been implemented consistently over the period which we have studied, there is consistency within individual surveys over time, in terms of the proportions of the adult population who are engaged in voluntary action, so we feel justified in this claim.

This raises the question of whether, given that the policy environment in the past three decades has been supportive, we might expect to have seen a significant increase in volunteering. Since the late 1970s there has been a consensus regarding the virtues of voluntary action, although specific reasons for supporting it, and the extent of practical steps to do so, have varied. Political discourses have ranged from base imperatives of economic necessity and naive anti-statism, to loftier impulses, such as the desire to inculcate civic virtues, or to promote individual wellbeing and the formation of social capital. Governments and advocates of the voluntary sector have placed different emphases on these arguments at different points in time (Chapter Two); although there has been plenty of supportive rhetoric, there has not been one consistent policy framework in support of voluntary action.

Introduction: challenges of obtaining accounts of volunteer motivation

Why do people volunteer? Although scholars have advanced a diverse range of accounts of motivation, which we have summarised in Chapter One, significant obstacles stand in the way of gathering data on volunteer motivation which relate to temporality and motive. It is unusual, if not impossible, to be in a position to capture individuals’ views on motivation while they are in the process of choosing to volunteer. Consideration of motives will usually be retrospective; however, as Musick and Wilson (2008) have identified, the problem with seeking information about the underlying motives for volunteering is that:

Respondents are also likely to conflate their motives for volunteering with more recently acquired views on the actual benefits that their experience of volunteering has brought either to them or to the beneficiaries of their volunteering. Retrospective discussion of motives is also likely to confuse motives with broader attitudinal views. Furthermore, motives overlap with triggers and influences: volunteering may result from the presentation of an opportunity (for example, to someone seeking a move back into employment after a career break). This could be regarded as a trigger, but is then rationalised by the respondent as a motive. Moreover, motive is not just related to the decision as to whether to volunteer or not, it is also related to the decision on where to volunteer, and what role to take. Given that over the lifecourse an individual may volunteer multiple times, each separate decision to volunteer will involve consideration of whether, where and how to volunteer.

Events that take place after an individual has volunteered may influence or reshape recall of motive, particularly when strong emotions are attached to the memories of these events (Lindsey, 2004; Bal, 1999; Portelli, 1998). Quality of recall can also be affected by over-rehearsal of certain autobiographical memories that are privileged over others (Talarico and Rubin, 2003).

Introduction

In this chapter we describe the secondary quantitative and qualitative data that we have used in this study. Our quantitative data are drawn from a range of robust and authoritative cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, and are complemented by rich longitudinal qualitative data from the Mass Observation Project (MOP). We consider the ways in which volunteering and community engagement are conceived of and measured, and the challenges posed for analysts by the particular nature of these two types of source. Each dataset has different definitions of voluntary action; we reflect on these definitions, and on how they may influence the responses given by participants. We describe the ways in which we sampled from each source, and consider the question of representativeness. A further section then considers the possibilities for, and challenges associated with, simultaneous usage of the MOP and social survey datasets.

Collectively the data sources constitute a considerable resource for exploring change in voluntary action in the UK over a long period of time. In practice, most of the quantitative datasets used relate to England, or to England and Wales (see discussion below), while nearly all the MOP writers sampled live in England, with a small number living elsewhere in the UK. Within the longitudinal datasets, tracking of individuals is possible for considerable periods of time – at least a decade, in the case of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), while the MOP material likewise permits us to follow individuals through extensive parts of their lives. The juxtaposition of the qualitative and quantitative material is also novel, with the qualitative data from MOP adding considerable depth to the survey data, while the latter provides context for the former. While no individual dataset has tracked individuals or measured volunteering in an identical manner throughout the period of our study, there is sufficient consistency within datasets, and in the overlaps between the periods for which individual surveys are available, to justify using the various sources to analyse continuity and change in voluntary action from the early years of the Thatcher government (the first survey dataset we use is for 1981) through to the Conservative government of Theresa May (although the last MOP directive we have used for this study was issued in 2012).

Introduction

Mass Observation (MO) was originally set up in 1937, becoming established during the Second World War, a period which witnessed a substantial extension of state intervention in the provision of welfare services. MO's work contributed greatly to the understanding of public attitudes during the period of wartime planning for the welfare state. For several subsequent decades a broadly-shared consensus on welfare held sway, associated with the primacy of public financing and provision of key elements of the welfare state, with voluntary initiatives by citizens playing a relatively residual part in the welfare mix. Of course, voluntarism never went away in the post-war period; voluntary effort and voluntary organisations continued to have articulate supporters, who made the case for more pluralist arrangements for the delivery of welfare services. Prior to 1979, however, few people outside rightwing thinktanks would have proposed that Beveridge's ‘perpetually moving frontier’ between statutory and voluntary sectors would shift substantially back in the direction of the latter. Arguably, nearly four decades after the Conservatives were returned to power in 1979, the shift has been as much one of rhetoric and style as of substance.

The advent of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative administration, committed to rolling back the state, raised the possibility that government policy might open up much more scope for greater reliance on voluntary organisations and voluntary action. In this chapter we therefore consider subsequent key changes in the policy landscape. Discussion of the development of social policy under the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major also provides opportunities to identify parallels with the post-2010 administrations led by David Cameron and Theresa May as well as continuities and discontinuities between those governments and those led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. All post-1979 Prime Ministers proclaimed their support, at various times and in different ways, either for voluntary action per se, for initiatives designed to enhance the scope for voluntary action, and for non-state provision of public services, although the means through which they pursued those objectives varied.

In the introductory chapter, referencing Kendall (2003; 2009), we noted that policy in relation to voluntarism in recent decades has tended towards measures targeted at voluntary action by individuals, initiatives to encourage the development of voluntary organisations, and the institutionalisation of mechanisms for bringing the voluntary sector into public policy deliberation.

Appendix: Anonymised details of writers