In the public and scientific discourse on welfare innovation and new public governance, community coproduction is thought to combine the best elements of the public and voluntary sectors, hence creating better and more efficient responses to social need. However, coproduction also blurs sectoral boundaries, potentially mixing incompatible practices, values and goals. In this paper, we investigate how volunteers and public sector employees experience and handle the coproduction ambivalence that results from cross-sector incompatibility. The paper is based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork on welfare coproduction among managers, employees and volunteers in a large Danish municipality.

Cross-sector co-production involving voluntary organisations in the production and delivery of social services has been adopted across many welfare states. Economic and demographic changes have led to increased involvement of volunteer initiatives in different welfare policy fields. How different field properties enable, constrain, and shape co-production practices remains, however, under researched. In this article, we address this shortcoming in a comparative case design exploring the practices of co-production within the two fields of elderly services and refugee services. We develop a conceptual framework and demonstrate that differential distribution of resources leads to diverging outcomes and perspectives for co-production. Based on a two-year in-depth study of one large Danish municipality, we find two forms of co-production practices, which reflect different field conditions. In the field of elderly services, co-production takes the form of ‘embedded’ practices, and in the field of refugee services co-production takes the form of ‘exterior’ practices. We demonstrate that each of these co-production forms entail ambiguous outcomes and antagonistic positions for voluntary and public sector actors, depending on the policy field.

Vulnerable citizens often depend on volunteers or others to translate their needs into relevant concerns for policy makers. This is particularly so in the context of co-production of public service provision. However, knowledge of how this translation works in practice is scarce. Based on a qualitative study of co-production activities targeting vulnerable elderly citizens and refugees, this paper explores volunteers’ translations of citizen needs and identifies two forms of failure: entangled translations fail because municipal staff suspect volunteers of justifying volunteer interests as citizen needs, while restricted translations fail to justify citizen needs as collective concerns because volunteers draw excessively on anecdotal formats.

Volunteering research focuses predominantly on predicting participation in volunteering, proceeding from the quasi-hegemonic foundation of resource theory and dominant-status theory. Empirical research in this tradition has provided extremely robust evidence that dominant groups in society are more likely to volunteer. At the same time, it has reinforced the status quo in the production of knowledge on volunteering, thereby neglecting the clear problematic of "inequality in volunteering." Compared to the guiding question of "participation," the concept of "inequality" can generate a more variegated, critical, and change-oriented research agenda. With this special issue, we aim to build a "new research front" in the field of volunteering. In this introduction, we advance a novel research agenda structured around a multidimensional understanding of inequality, concomitantly delineating four central research programs focusing on (a) resources, (b) interactions, (c) governmentalities, and (d) epistemologies. We discuss the focus of these lines of research in greater detail with respect to inequality in volunteering, their main critique of dominant research on participation in volunteering, and key elements of the new research agenda.

Policymakers across Western welfare states increasingly make full citizenship contingent on refugees adapting to liberal democratic values and practising active citizenship. Simultaneously, the New Public Governance paradigm has reinvigorated policymakers’ belief in civil society as a needed partner for tackling societal challenges, such as integration. Consequently, cross-sector co-production of civic communities is being perceived as a model for increasing the participation and integration of refugees. The practices and outcomes of cross-sector co-produced integration remain underexplored. Based on a three-year qualitative study of four cross-sector integration projects in a Danish municipality, this paper contributes knowledge on the matter. We explore how volunteers and municipal agents practise the co-production of civic communities to enhance participation among refugees. We find that a recurrent way of co-producing communities is through public agents commissioning communities from voluntary organisations. Next, we identify two recurrent forms of participation available to refugees through the commissioned communities. In the first form, termed conditioned participation, the commissioning of communities is characterised by inter-sectorial distance and knowledge gaps, making participation conditioned on the resources of each refugee. In the second form, termed clientised participation, the inter-sectorial collaboration resembles a commissioner/service-provider relation, with refugees as clients being referred to voluntary services.

Within the rich literature on volunteering, the topic of volunteer–user interaction and the mechanisms causing or mitigating inequality in this interaction remain understudied. Moreover, knowledge on how digitalization affects voluntary interaction is scarce. Based on a qualitative study of a Danish organization that offers virtual voluntary tutoring, this paper shows how technological and formal aspects of the organizational context may mitigate the risk of volunteers engaging in paternalistic, intimacy-seeking behaviour. First, reliance on information and communications technology (ICT) and managerial logics sustains a bounded form of interaction in which solving a problem is the focal point, while access to personal background information is limited. Second, the organizational design suspends sociability as a criterion for differential treatment of users. Third, anonymous mediated interaction enables temporal and audio–visual asymmetry, allowing users to perform ‘digitally sustained impression management’.

In this chapter, the authors investigate whether the involvement of volunteers and voluntary organizations in community co-production helps create the prerequisites for innovation in the public sector. Specifically, the authors investigate whether community co-production (1) helps increase voluntary participation and the sharing of knowledge and ideas and (2) contributes to the delivery and implementation of public services. The chapter is based on a large qualitative case study of co-production in a Danish municipality. The main finding is that co-producing volunteers do not participate in the development or design of municipal policies and services. Furthermore, cross-sector collaboration mainly requires volunteers to fill gaps in the existing public services rather than help develop and innovate public services.

Throughout the past three decades, changing governments in Denmark have been cultivating a more proactive role for civil society organizations by emphasizing the legitimacy of voluntary social work as part of the social service provision in a hard-pressed welfare state. At the same time, political and public actors praise the civic virtues and democratic skills that volunteers obtain when participating in any kind of voluntary organization. This notion of voluntary organizations as “schools for democracy” already lacks empirical grounding. Given the increased instrumentalization of voluntary social work, it becomes even more important to ask what the modes of participation look like among volunteers within the new organizational forms. In this article, we review key trends and changes at the institutional level and present data from a long-term ethnographic study that explores the mode of participation of volunteers within an organizational form that responds to the demands of the current civic landscape. We demonstrate that while the organizational form in question aptly and strategically navigates the competitive, welfare-oriented, institutional environment, the space for civic action among the volunteers is limited.

Artiklen præsenterer resultater fra en kvalitativ undersøgelse af den danske natklub VEGAs Lounge. Artiklens teoretiske ramme består hovedsageligt af Baumans tanker om flydende modernitet samt Baudrillards overvejelser om cirkulerende tegn. Den første del af artiklen fokuserer på socialiteten blandt de unge mennesker, der besøger Loungen. Med udgangspunkt i Baumans teori om den sen-moderne destabilisering af kollektive grupper og Veblens tanker om iøjnefaldende forbrug foreslås begrebet ”iøjnefaldende socialitet” for at beskrive, hvordan socialiteten med gode venner i et sen-moderne velfærdssamfund bliver en eftertragtet ressource, hvorfor den fremvises og nydes på en iøjnefaldende måde. I artiklens anden del undersøges det, hvordan Loungegæsterne bærer det samme tøj, der refererer til et begrænset antal urbane stilmæssige ikoner, samtidigt med, at de udtrykker sig selv individuelt heri. Ved at trække på Baudrillards tanker om simulation fremhæves det, hvordan dette er muligt, da alle i Loungens urbane setting kan indsætte sig selv som tegnets mere oprindelige referent. Endeligt undersøger artiklen den afslappede holdning og attitude, der præger Loungegæsterne. Begrebet ”iøjnefaldende afslappethed” foreslås for at beskrive, hvordan en afslappet attitude signalerer, at individet succesfuldt kan håndtere sen-modernitetens udfordring om at skabe en velafbalanceret identitet. Gennem den iøjnefaldende fremvisning af socialitet og afslappethed fremviser Loungegæsten altså nogle relevante ressourcer og evner til at håndtere de sen-moderne livsforhold.