Beyond choice: ‘Thick’ volunteering and the case of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution

This article problematizes the dominant assumption in the literature on volunteer work that it is undertaken primarily as a matter of individual choice. Using findings from a qualitative study of volunteers at the not-for-profit organization, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, it is shown that volunteering exists within a dense web of social relations, especially familial and communal relations, so that volunteering is recursively constituted by structure and agency. The concept of ‘thick volunteering’ is developed to denote how in some cases these social relations, especially when the work involved is dangerous, may make volunteering especially significant.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  Human Relations

• Publication date

  2016-01-01

• Fields of study

  Sociology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1177/0018726715580156
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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