This study explores individual- and contextual-level determinants of volunteering and donating as two voluntary acts of philanthropy in 11 Arab Middle East and North African countries. Using multilevel binary logistic regression modeling, we analyze data from 18,818 Muslim respondents collected by the Arab Barometer in 2018-2019. Combining insights from global, Arab, and Muslim philanthropic studies on the one hand, and political sociology on the other, we test both globally comparative and context-specific hypotheses. Our findings reveal that the normative effects of Islam positively associate with donating money, whereas civic culture more strongly informs volunteering. However, the control variable, educational attainment, had the largest effect on both outcomes, which we link to resource theory and state-induced mandated volunteering among higher-educated youngsters. Our findings underscore the importance of both religious and civic influences operating at structural and cultural levels in shaping voluntary philanthropic behavior by Muslims in Arab countries.

This research note examines vertical stratification in formal volunteering. More specifically, it focuses on occupational spillover from positions in the paid labor market to volunteer positions based on the new global ILO standard for the measurement of volunteer work. This methodology is innovative in its similar coding of paid and volunteer work according to a standardized international occupational classification. This study uses data from the 2014 Belgian Labor Force Survey (N = 795), to which the ILO module was added. Based on results of multivariate logistic regression on a three-tier volunteer occupational structure, we reject the existence of an overall spillover effect. We nevertheless find evidence of a "constrained occupational spillover" for the highest occupational category, which experiences "downward mobility" toward intermediate volunteer positions, due to the structural constraints of the volunteer occupational system. The results further identify educational attainment and gender as key determinants of the volunteer occupational hierarchy.

Blood donation is vital to the functioning of health systems, yet racially minoritised groups remain systematically underrepresented in donor populations. We advance an organisational perspective to reveal the organisational logics that govern who counts as a donor. Building on Healy's concept of blood collection regimes, which highlights the role of organisations in shaping donor profiles, this study compares the discursive strategies of the Red Cross in Belgium, specifically in Flanders (RCF) and the NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) in the UK. Our frame analysis of official webpages from both organisations enables us to identify three dominant frames: the biomedical frame (emphasising safety, risk, and exclusion through negative reciprocity); the citizenship frame (linking donation to civic duty and solidarity via generalised reciprocity); the lifeworld frame (positioning donation as a relational, community-based act, aligned with positive reciprocity). Although present in both contexts, these frames operate differently in the two cases. RCF maintains a colourblind, universalist discourse that masks structural exclusions under the guise of neutrality, while NHSBT explicitly addresses Black communities through biomedical appeals linked to sickle cell disease. Both framings contribute to the construction of donor profiles that systematically exclude certain racially minoritised groups. More generally, we conclude that blood collection agencies do not merely manage supply; they also shape racialised belonging and visibility within national health systems. Reimagining blood donation in increasingly diverse societies requires more than targeted recruitment-it demands a fundamental reckoning with how safety and diversity are framed, and whose bodies are rendered necessary, risky, or expendable.

While scholars of management have extensively discussed paradoxes, scholars of volunteer management have given them little systematic attention. This special issue brings together the field of paradox studies with the research field of volunteer management. While many studies highlight paradoxes between different “missions” and mandates within volunteer-involving organizations, this introduction suggests using a “dramaturgical” approach that highlights the interplay between different actors, audiences, instruments for communication and action, and the broader moral, institutional frameworks in which the organizations operate. We review the field of paradox studies in management, then connect it to volunteer management, and then suggest ways that the dramaturgical approaches might help systematize some of the paradoxes that scholars have found in organizations that use volunteers. Next, the introduction summarizes this issue’s articles. Finally, we suggest that paradoxes take a more prominent role in studies of volunteer management.

Inspired by the analytical shift toward understanding altruism from an institutional perspective, this article presents an empirical analysis of the impact of institutionalized solidarity on attitudes toward payment for blood or plasma donations, in terms of both the level of welfare provision and confidence in the welfare system. Postulating that institutionalized solidarity is intertwined with group-based solidarity, this article offers a more refined understanding of the relationship between institutional context and attitudes toward paid donation by incorporating measures of social cohesion in the analysis. Based on Eurobarometer data from 2014, the results indicate that support for cash payment for donation is lower in European countries where social spending is higher. Similarly, aggregated levels of trust in the social security system are associated with less support for payment for donation. These findings point to the importance of institutionalized solidarity for the manifestation of support for non-remunerated blood and plasma donation.

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.

Always a staple of community life, community events have recently undergone a change from grass-roots, bottom-up initiatives to large, organized happenings featuring a range of actors, forms, and goals. Instrumental to the success of these events are the efforts of people volunteering for an event, who constitute a flexible, economically efficient part of the workforce, which must be managed and cultivated. A new form of community-event volunteering is emerging, which shares several aspects of episodic volunteering and third-party involvement, while offering a different perspective on event volunteering. Through events like National Days of Service, people can volunteer as an event, engaging in short hands-on volunteer opportunities, celebrating and promoting the act of volunteering itself. This angle on event volunteering poses new questions for volunteer-management practice. Which volunteer profiles do these events attract? Which design elements are central in their experience, and how do they rate this experience? We cooperated with event organizers to study the first National Day of Service in Flanders, which was part of a broader, heavily mediatized solidarity event. Findings indicate that the event served as both an entry-point for new volunteers and a celebration for their experienced counterparts.

Always a staple of community life, community events have recently undergone a change from grass-roots, bottom-up initiatives to large, organised happenings featuring a range of actors, forms, and goals. Instrumental to the success of these events are the efforts of people volunteering for an event, who constitute a flexible, economically efficient part of the workforce, which must be managed and cultivated. A new form of community event volunteering is emerging, which shares several aspects of episodic volunteering and third-party involvement, while offering a different perspective on event volunteering. Through events like National Days of Service, people can volunteer as an event, engaging in short hands-on volunteer opportunities, celebrating and promoting the act of volunteering itself. This angle on event volunteering poses new questions for volunteer management practice. Which volunteer profiles do these events attract? Which design elements are central in their experience, and how do volunteers rate this experience? We cooperated with event organisers to study the first National Day of Service in Flanders, Belgium, which was part of a broader, heavily mediatised solidarity event. Findings indicate that the event served as both an entry point for new volunteers and a celebration for their experienced counterparts.

Although European blood collection organizations are currently obtaining sufficient and safe blood from the majority population, they report having difficulty recruiting first and second-generation immigrants from non-European countries. Most existing studies on these underrepresented groups, who have been coined the "missing minorities" in blood donation, have adopted an instrumental approach that focuses on the development of targeted recruitment strategies to overcome specific barriers to donation faced by members of these minorities. Although this approach does offer several short-term benefits, our central argument is that it is one-sided in its questioning of the non-participation of ethnic minorities. The literature currently lacks research on how the blood procurement system is failing to include minorities. Drawing on recent social theory, we seek a broader sociological understanding of minority under-representation in blood donor populations by shifting the analytic focus toward a critical examination of the main pillars of the procurement system within the European context. This paper advances a novel analytical framework based on two general propositions. First, we apply the literature on "citizenship regimes" to argue that blood donation is part of one specific institutionalization of citizenship and solidarity. We then reconceptualize the "problem" of missing minorities in European blood donation as an application for social change, suggesting avenues related to blood collection as a way of renegotiating minority-majority relations of solidarity.

Maintaining an adequate blood supply for transfusion poses a pressing challenge to society. We argue that this challenge has not been adequately addressed in previous research. Building upon Healy’s seminal work on ‘blood-collection regimes’ and the subsequent shift towards a field-level approach that broadens the analytical focus beyond the dyadic relationship between donors and organizations, we embed the act of blood donation within the organizational field in which blood establishments operate. We assume that varying modes of governance shape the organizational practices of donor recruitment and blood collection. Our analysis is based on Eurobarometer data from 2014 (number of countries = 28; number of individuals = 19,363). The results identify considerable variance in donation rates according to field characteristics in terms of hierarchical centralization and competitiveness. Decentralized systems without competition perform worst in terms of the recruitment of (first-time) blood donors. Competitive systems in which several different bodies share responsibility for the provision of blood to patients yield the highest donation rates.

This paper focuses on affective citizenship amongst young immigrants without formal citizenship. Citizenship studies use the 'affective turn' to address the central role of affect in current integration and citizenship policies of many Western nation-states, but the lived affective experiences of new immigrants without formal citizenship status concerning these policies remain poorly understood. We advance an analytical framework of 'affective liminality' for examining differences in the collectively patterned affects of young immigrants, according to their specific situations of liminal legality and in relation to governmental 'feeling rules'. An ethnographic study in Belgium reveals that, in general, fear, frustration and hope are key features in the lives of these young people, reflecting the insecurities and ambiguities of their 'in-between' legal statuses. Different situations of liminal legality are entangled with different affective outcomes. Counter-intuitively, as young people progress along the path towards formal citizenship, their feelings become more 'unruly', and thus less likely to comply with the feeling rules of the state. In addition to being paralyzing or disciplining, their affective experiences might thus be emancipatory as well, inciting them to fight exclusion.

As part of current migration processes, there is burgeoning scholarly interest in the civic engagements of non-citizens. While some scholars scrutinize the subversive potential of “acts of citizenship” (Isin) by non-citizens, prefiguring radically different modes of political organization, attention should also be drawn to more institutionalized processes of political socialization of immigrants, as aspiring citizens within the receiving nations. In light of critical scholarship that considers citizenship a disciplinary technology of in- and exclusion, advocating full participation on behalf of and by immigrants involves complex processes of negotiation and legitimation of desired/effective forms of civic engagement, both for immigrants and civil society organizations (CSO’s). To gain a more systematic and in-depth insight in the civic engagements of young immigrants without formal citizenship status in the context of a state-funded CSO, we conducted an ethnographic study of a project of a Belgian CSO specifically aimed at ‘giving a voice’ to young immigrants. Based on 2,5 years of participant observation and 22 in-depth interviews, we scrutinize what kinds of civic engagements are prevalent and how these are negotiated in everyday practices by young immigrants, volunteers and paid professionals. Building on Lichterman and Eliasoph’s (2014) civic action approach and their concept of ‘scene style’, we analyse different patterns of civic engagement and the tensions between these. Our study reveals a complex environment where different scene styles reflecting different forms of civic engagement occurred together: advocacy style, club style volunteering, personalized politics style and leisure style. Moreover, we point to a regulation of the youngsters’ voices and a process of political socialization through participation in the project. This study shows clearly the challenges and complexities of civil society projects that aim to emancipate immigrants within a state-funded CSO.

Restrictive policies in Europe are accompanied by exclusionary discourses concerning national citizenship for immigrants, depicting them dichotomously as either 'deserving' or 'undeserving'. In our analysis of immigration and integration policies in Belgium, we focus on how these political discourses interact to differentiate between categories of immigrants who are included or excluded to some extent in ways that are more complex than the dichotomy suggests. We conduct framing and category analyses of migration and integration policies to reveal a discursive field consisting of four central frames that generate seven categories of immigrants with varying degrees of deservingness. Instead of a linear path towards citizenship, migrants are trapped in a labyrinth. We reveal four important contradictions in the policy discourse, leading to the conclusion that permanently probationary citizenship status is the highest attainable goal for certain immigrants. Finally, we discuss the implications of this labyrinth for the socioeconomic position of immigrants.

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the representation of social movement organizations (SMOs) and the frames to which they are linked in a newspaper debate developing after a specific human-rights violation. This analysis is intended to demonstrate how research on social movements and human-rights frames and research on the access of NGOs to the media can complement each other in the investigation of mediated human-rights debates. The violation addressed in this study concerns the eviction of many Roma from their dwellings and their expulsion from France in the summer of 2010. We analyzed the reports in the French newspaper Le Monde on this violation. In response to the first research question – “How were SMOs represented in the selected newspaper debate?” – our analysis indicates that SMOs were less strongly represented than were actors in the French government, except through general reference. With regard to the second research question – “To which frames on the human-rights violation were SMOs linked in the selected newspaper debate?” – the framing analysis reveals a prevalent anti-racist frame, very little explicit reference to human rights, and frames influenced by national logics.

The scholarly exploration of “volunteering” has mainly focused on identifying its antecedents or consequences, in order to facilitate the management and promotion of volunteering. In this dominant stream of research, the phenomenon of volunteering thus remains a “black box”—a taken-for-granted and fixed reality. The article sets out to open the black box of “volunteering” by not accepting it as a fixed, unproblematic object, but by exploring volunteering as a constructed phenomenon whose boundaries are managed and utilized by a variety of actors. To deconstruct volunteering, the article utilizes the Latourian notions of “hybridization” and “purification” as simultaneous and entangled mechanisms. We critically review the literature on “volunteering” and problematize the fundamental properties of the “pure” perception of “volunteering,” their hybridization and eventual purification. The article concludes by highlighting how the constant tension between hybridization and purification mechanisms is in fact what makes volunteering proliferate as a phenomenon that has an increasing public significance in contemporary society.

Corporations are increasingly interested in promoting corporate volunteering, and their efforts are aligned with supportive nonprofits and public policies. The article seeks to understand the reasons for this growing interest. It is based on insights from an ethnographic exploration of corporate volunteering activities in a transnational nonprofit that involves highly skilled corporate volunteers in its programs of entrepreneurship education. A multi-sited fieldwork was conducted in the organization’s program offices and its corporate partners in the United States, Belgium, and Israel. The analysis demonstrates how corporate volunteering conjoins various elements—ideological, interactionist, symbolic, and ethical—to maintain the creative engagement of highly skilled employees in cognitive capitalism. The article thus argues that the increasing interest in corporate volunteering emerges from a classwide rationality that extends beyond instrumental interests of particular corporations, as corporate volunteering constitutes a governmentality technique that molds employees’ subjectivities and maintains their wider commitment to capitalism.