Volunteers/Volunteering

Volunteers and volunteering make an essential contribution to nonprofit organizations and the development of more cohesive communities. Whereas varied interdisciplinary approaches have presented volunteering as the result of a dominant socioeconomic status or an altruistic personality type, organizational communication scholarship has focused on volunteering as an alternative form of work. Volunteers' efforts can be framed as poor quality and amateur or as a form of personal and professional development. Increasingly, volunteering is blending with work, leisure, and educational practices in other contexts, such as corporate volunteering, voluntourism, and service learning. Although volunteering has been conceptualized as requiring ongoing formal organizational commitment, other forms, such as episodic volunteering and micro volunteering using new communication technologies, are becoming more popular.