Give up volunteering? The political economy of unwaged labour

Give up volunteering?The political economy of unwaged

labour

ESRC Lecture Series 3 July 2012Newcastle

Dr FabianFrenzelSchool of ManagementUniversity of Leicester

Outline

• Volunteers and activists: What’s the difference?

• Volunteering as unwaged labour

• Example: Stokes Croft Regeneration

• Discussion

What’s the difference ?

• ‘To name an activity volunteering rather thanactivism makes a big difference. Volunteering isassociated with helping and caring, service provision,leisure-time activity, and associations that sustaindemocracy, while activism is associated with change-oriented collective actions like demonstrations andmaybe even riots that challenge the smooth runningof society’ (Musick& Wilson 2008:18)

• ‘While volunteering is a concept devoid of power, there is an explicit or implicit orientation toward power and social change in activism.’ (Henriksen& Svedberg 2010:95)

Subjectivities -Identities

• ‘Volunteerism is one form of civic involvement, and it can, in fact, serve as a first step toward political activism, but it can also occur without a connection to a political agenda’ (Hirsch 1993:36)

• Many students feel that service and advocacy have nothing to do with political activism. (Hirsch 1993:35)

• 48% consider themselves to be activists

• But 37% don’t want to be associated with activism. (Hefferman 1992)

• (1) informal volunteering that consists of helping those who need it and recruiting friends as volunteers

• (2) formal volunteering that consists of unpaid participation in the group work of voluntary associations

• (3) social and political activism that is unpaid participation (i.e. volunteering) in social movements and political organizations.

Civic Volunteering (Janoski 2010)

Contextual approaches of Civic volunteering (Janoski 2010)

Beyond subjective motivation

The role of social networks,family, belonging tocertain categories ofpeople (gender, race, etc.)and the role of opinionleaders.

Outcomes:1) civil maintenance2) civil repair3) civil degradation

Policy Feedback

• ‘One mighthypothesize, then,that by providing anarray of incentives forpeople to support andengage in directservice aimed at thedistressed individual,as opposed tocollective actionaimed at governmentand market failures,the state reinforcesthe perception thatproblems adhere tothe individual, not tothe collective.’ (Goss2010:134)

Civic volunteering as unwaged labour

• Labour : human activity that produces value.

• Wage labour is valued in money. Money is a measure of value.

• How is unwaged labour measured and valued?

Value and Values

‘But it is probably nocoincidence thatit’s precisely here where one hearsabout “values” in the plural sense:family values,religious virtues, theaesthetic values of art, and so on.Where there is no single system ofvalue, one is left with a wholeseries of heterogeneous, disparateones.' (Graeber 2001: 56)

‘Even in our own market-ridden society there are allsorts of domains—rangingfrom housework to hobbies,political action, personalprojects of any sort—where isno such homogenizingapparatus [the money basedmeasure of value].'

Value Struggle

Q: How does this help us understand the difference between volunteering and political action?

Values accumulate to‘common-wealth’, theshared wealth andresources of mankind.

Value accumulatesto capital:private wealth

There is conflict between these domains

Stokes Croft, Bristol

• Regeneration as unwaged labour

• Generating community

• Gentrification as value struggle

• Volunteering and activism part of it

Question:

• Why do we differentiate volunteering from a broad range of voluntary, unwaged labour?

Discussion

• Volunteering (as compared to activism) is not (just) apolitical, overlooking structural constrains.

• Singling out certain activities as ‘volunteering’ is an element in the value struggle.

• Certain forms of unwaged labour can be co-opted as an exception that confirms what really matters: the regime of wage-labour and capital.

References• Goss, K.A. (2010): Civil Society and Civic Engagement: Towards a Multi-

Level Theory of Policy Feedbacks, Journal of Civil Society, 6:2, 119-143• Graeber, D.(2001) Toward an anthropological theory of value : the false

coin of our own dreams, Palgrave New York• Hefferman 1992 (as quoted in Hirsch 1993)• Henriksen, L. S. & Svedberg, L. (2010) Volunteering and Social Activism:

Moving beyond the Traditional Divide, Journal of Civil Society, 6:2, 95-98• Hirsch, D. T. (1993) Politics through Action: Student Service and Activism in

the 1990s. Change 25:5: 32-36• Janoski, T. (2010) The Dynamic Processes of Volunteering in Civil Society: A

Group and Multi-Level Approach, Journal of Civil Society, 6:2, 99-118• Musick, M. M. & Wilson, J. (2008) Volunteers. A Social Profile

(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).