Governing Through Volunteering: The Discursive Field of Government-Initiated Volunteering in the Form of Workfare Volunteering. (April 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: De Waele, Els; Hustinx, Lesley
• Other Names: Brudney Jeffrey L. guest-editor.; Handy Femida guest-editor.; Meijs Lucas C.P.M. guest-editor.
• Is Part Of: Nonprofit and voluntary sector quarterly. Volume 48:Number 2(2019) Supplment
• Page Start: 72S
• Page End: 102S
• Publication Date: 2019-04
• Subjects: third-party volunteering -- workfare volunteering -- governing through volunteering -- governmentality perspective; Nonprofit organizations -- Periodicals; Voluntarism -- Periodicals; Charity organization -- Periodicals; 361.763
• DOI: 10.1177/0899764018783094
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0899-7640

Abstract

Increasing third-party intervention in volunteering represents a key change in the environment of volunteering. One significant expression is "workfare volunteering": the governmental use of volunteering to foster the economic and/or social reintegration of social assistance recipients. We contribute to existing theory on "third-party volunteering" by studying the shifting discursive field in which volunteering becomes re-entangled with workfare volunteering. Our contribution is based on a governmentality-inspired discourse analysis of internal documents on workfare volunteering in one Belgian social assistance center. We conclude that workfare volunteering entails a strong violation of "voluntary" and "unpaid" properties of volunteering, relegates volunteering to an inferior status relative to paid work, and depicts workfare volunteers as suffering from a clear deficit: the inability to work under regular labor market condition. Through the discursive entanglement of various citizenship frames, the workfare volunteer is cast as an ever-aspiring, yet permanently failing citizen.