The boundary-work of volunteering and the value of unwaged work in the dual crisis of care

Abstract

Based on qualitative research into formal volunteering in semi-rural towns in the north-east and south-west of Germany, this article analyses the consequences of a turn to volunteering in the German welfare regime. The article explores the meaning and function of volunteering for volunteers, organisations and the welfare regime, and identifies a series of conflicting goals. While fiscal pressures and staff shortages may lead to an instrumental resort to volunteering, its value is repeatedly constituted by the fact that it is not waged or professionalised work. Individuals often seek out volunteering opportunities to (re)claim their autonomy or assert the value of care, in some cases to compensate for the frustrations of the neoliberal restructuring of care work. However, volunteers also provide components of caring squeezed out of waged care work due to this restructuring. Moreover, volunteers do not always substitute components of waged work, they also step in where previously there might have been a family member to help someone. The article discusses the value of practices of volunteering through the subjective interpretations of volunteers and coordinators to show how these conflicting goals provoke three types of boundary-work that define the remit of volunteering: (1) claims to volunteering as unique; (2) volunteering as compensatory activity; (3) the defence of volunteering through closure and resignification. The article suggests that volunteering in part stabilises a dual crisis of care, understood as a crisis of waged care work and of social reproduction, without offering a sustainable solution.

Introduction

In western welfare states, austerity, neoliberal restructuring and demographic change have precipitated a crisis of care (Dowling, 2021; Fraser, 2016): demographic changes coupled with greater female labour market participation mean that families are more dispersed and women are less available as a care resource within the home or face double burdens of waged and unwaged work; all the while, the need for care – from childcare in single-parent and dual-earner households to eldercare in ageing societies – is rising. Yet, in public sectors beset by fiscal consolidation and private sectors premised on extracting profit, gaps in provision have grown and working conditions have deteriorated. Increased workloads and staff shortages in areas such as education or health and social care place staff under pressure to prioritise the most necessary of tasks, while compassion and attentiveness can be difficult to uphold when under the pressure of rationalisation from the twin logics of cost-saving and profit maximisation. There are thus two dimensions of crisis at play: there is a crisis of social reproduction where individuals and families face difficulties in meeting their care needs and there is crisis of waged care work where paid staff must carry out care work under untenable conditions. With a focus on the German context, this article explores volunteering as a mechanism of stabilisation for what we consequently may term a dual crisis of care.

Sociological scholarship has been concerned with how volunteers are instrumentalised within the welfare state to ‘plug gaps’ or substitute for paid staff due to fiscal pressures (Baines et al., 2017; Humphris, 2019; Milligan & Conradson, 2006; van Bochove et al., 2018; van Dyk, 2018, p. 540; Verhoeven & van Bochove, 2018). The mobilisation of volunteers has also been criticised (e.g. by Muehlebach, 2012) as part of a neoliberal ‘reprivatisation of social reproduction’ (Bakker, 2007, p. 542), because it increases the amount of unwaged reproductive and caring labour performed to sustain life, maintain social cohesion and reproduce labour power as the precondition for producing surplus value in capitalist economies (Federici, 2012). Such a critique brings into purview the wider social organisation of labour that connects waged and unwaged work across different boundaries (Glucksmann, 2006, p. 21). These boundaries shift following cultural changes or policy initiatives (Taylor, 2004, p. 44), or due to historical struggles over where to draw the line between what constitutes waged work and what does not, and where the boundary between public and private responsibilities for social reproduction across families and households, state, market and society lies (Fraser, 2016, p. 104). Consequently, it is necessary to understand the turn to volunteering within the context of social reproduction, the configuration of welfare regimes and the organisations within which volunteering occurs. At the same time, it is also necessary to enquire into the subjective interpretations of the actors themselves (volunteers, service users, paid staff) to understand how their practices shape voluntary work and inform its function(s) in contemporary society.

This article contributes to the scholarly debates in sociology about the role of volunteering within contemporary welfare regimes from the vantage point of a dual crisis of care. Drawing on empirical research carried out in Germany, I analyse the effects of an increased reliance on volunteers, while exploring the value and function that volunteering has for volunteers, organisations and the welfare regime. On the one hand, volunteers are enlisted across education, health, social care and other social services to provide components of caring squeezed out of paid work due to time pressure. On the other hand, volunteers step in where previously there might have been a family member to help someone. At the same time, there are areas of volunteering where the very value of the voluntary activity lies in the fact that it is not waged or professionalised work. Moreover, individuals seek out volunteering opportunities to (re)claim their autonomy or assert the value of care, in some cases to compensate for the frustrations of the neoliberal restructuring of care work. I show how these conflicting goals have provoked forms of boundary-work to protect volunteering from instrumentalisation, while also contributing to its further formalisation. I identify three types of boundary-work: (1) claims to volunteering as unique; (2) volunteering as compensatory activity; and (3) defence of volunteering through closure and resignification. First, I introduce my theoretical framework and methodological approach, before presenting and discussing my findings.

Volunteering as unwaged work

Volunteering foregoes one of the central features of work in a capitalist economy, namely remuneration. It is unwaged, non-compulsory and must benefit someone beyond the volunteer themselves or members of their household or family (International Labour Organisation [ILO], 2021, pp. 3–4). Volunteering’s logics of organisation are markedly supposed to be different from waged work. Waged work involves giving up one’s time in return for an income, having to carry out tasks that are determined by others (e.g. a boss, a client, a shareholder) and is not always something one necessarily wants to do. Volunteering is supposed to be a freely chosen activity with intrinsic value to the volunteer (Egerton & Mullan, 2008; Field & Johnson, 1993; Flores, 2014); it can be done by laypersons and does not necessarily require prior expertise, specific qualifications or stringent adherence to professional codes of conduct. Moreover, neither the time, task and performance management of waged work, nor its productivity and efficiency-enhancing imperatives apply in the same ways.

However, such demarcations are not always upheld in practice and volunteering is not always freely chosen (Kelemen et al., 2017). Examples include corporate volunteering that obliges employees and instances where volunteering is a conditionality of unemployment benefit (Kelemen et al., 2017), or situations where the hope of finding gainful employment is leveraged to compel the young or unemployed to work for free (Allan, 2019; Dean, 2015). Imposed too is volunteering that relies on gendered responsibilities for care (Andersen et al., 2022; Davis & Ellis, 2002). Moreover, monetary incentives for volunteering risk exploiting individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds needing to supplement low or no income or circumvent limited access to the labour market (Jakob, 2016). Additionally, as the third sector has become more professionalised and entrepreneurial, the economic logics of cost-efficiency and performance measurement more readily align voluntary activities with the logic of waged work (Read, 2021).

As a cost-saving measure, the use of volunteers can lead to less qualified laypersons replacing trained staff, while inserting a discretional logic into the statutory realm at odds with the necessity to ensure the reliable provision of basic services. At the same time, volunteers do not always simply replace paid staff. They may also assist them, thereby augmenting an existing service; volunteers may even provide a discreet service of their own (Cameron et al., 2022; Overgaard, 2015; van Bochove et al., 2018) that is germane to the qualities and values of voluntary work (Payne, 2002). Furthermore, the meaning attributed to activities depends on context, which in turn shapes how activities are performed (Taylor, 2004, p. 39). For example, a British survey revealed how hospital volunteers distinguished between public and commercial contexts: while respondents were happy to volunteer for public institutions, they were less inclined to do so for a profit-making organisation, lest their efforts benefit private interests as opposed to the common good (Naylor et al., 2013, pp. 24–25). Clearly, volunteering is premised on value practices, i.e. ways of performing activities with a particular ethos (a normative set of principles) and affective disposition (a way of relating to others), both of which are legitimised within a broader societal context (De Angelis, 2007, p. 6; Graeber, 2001, p. 254; Skeggs, 2014, p. 4). Volunteering also relies on boundary-work (Lamont & Molnár, 2002), through which volunteers, programme coordinators and paid staff demarcate, negotiate or even blur the boundaries of what is considered a rightfully voluntary activity or way of volunteering, and what is or should be professional or waged work. How boundaries are drawn is not only a matter of individual or organisational preference but depends on legal and policy frameworks (Hoad, 2002), working conditions and welfare state configurations (Kirkegaard & Andersen, 2018; Overgaard, 2015; van Bochove et al., 2018). With a focus on value practices, this article contributes to the sociological analysis of boundary-work in volunteering in two ways: (1) by investigating how the reconfiguration of services in the German welfare regime prompts much greater attention to the boundaries of volunteering; and (2) by focusing on the affective register of volunteering to make sense of the meaning and value volunteers and programme coordinators attribute to volunteering at an individual, organisational and societal level.

Volunteering in the German welfare regime

The German conservative-corporatist welfare regime (Esping-Andersen, 1990) has long envisaged a role for welfare associations and other non-profits as intermediaries providing social services on behalf of the state. Despite reforms, social provisioning has remained comparatively stable in Germany due to the statutory social insurance system funded primarily through employer and employee contributions, which since 1995 has also included insurance for long-term care. The ideological emphasis on entitlement-through-contribution underpinning this system does not necessarily contradict the ‘tendential shift from state provision to self-care, from public to private responsibility and from collective to individual risk management’ (Lessenich, 2015, p. 136), which has also affected Germany in the neoliberal era. An increase in precarity and atypical employment has further diminished social protection for those affected. In addition, even 35 years after German reunification, economic inequality between East and West Germany persists. Moreover, the organisations involved in providing social services face considerable cost pressures as they have increasingly had to compete for scarce resources.

New legislation in 2013 further incentivised volunteering (Ehrenamtsstärkungsgesetz). Concurrently, public funding was made available to support civil society initiatives and foundations (Ehrenamtsstiftungen) were set up to promote volunteering. Survey figures suggest that these efforts have been relatively successful, with more people volunteering today than a decade ago, including in East Germany where historically numbers were lower. However, the statistics include a broad swathe of activities, and figures vary considerably depending on the area of volunteering. The highest rate of volunteering (13.5% of the population) is in sports, while figures are lower for social services (8%) and health (2%) (Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens and Youth [BMFSFJ], 2019, p. 21). Agencies (run by charities or local councils) match prospective volunteers with suitable opportunities. The recruitment, training and coordination of volunteering has also been professionalised accompanied by commercial digital platforms and software tools to facilitate volunteering (Mos, 2021).

This encouragement of volunteering is accompanied by regulatory and discursive efforts at role discernment. While the BMFSFJ has insisted that ‘volunteering must never be instrumentalised by the state for the maintenance of public services’ (BMFSFJ, 2016, p. 5), new legislation in 2017 integrated volunteering into the social insurance system. Care recipients can now use part of their long-term care allowance (Pflegegeld) to compensate volunteers for their time at up to Є10/hour, which is roughly a third of the hourly rate for paid care (Siegl, 2024). Volunteers must register with the local council or volunteer through an organisation, and they must be vetted and receive training, but not perform tasks that require professional training or medical expertise. Evident here are boundary-work at a regulatory level and an increased formalisation of volunteering. It is within this broader framework that the boundary-work of volunteers and programme coordinators occurs.

Methodology

My analysis rests on qualitative research conducted into formal volunteering in the areas of eldercare; mental health and disability; social services; leisure and school activities of children; women’s rights and domestic violence; refugees and asylum seekers; sporting events; library and other municipal services. The sample includes 29 interviews carried out in semi-rural towns in the north-east and south-west of Germany between 2017 and 2019. Seventeen semi-structured interviews (60–90 minutes) were conducted with individuals responsible for overseeing, managing or coordinating volunteering in paid positions in NGOs, foundations or charities, as well as in one case a local council and in another case a municipal library. Questions aimed at understanding the institutional, regulatory structures of volunteering in the specific contexts. Twelve structured interviews (90–120 minutes) were conducted with individuals engaged in regular formal volunteering, which explored volunteer motivations, contextualising these within biographical narratives, ethical frameworks and societal and political views. The focus here was on the concrete activities and subjective interpretations of the volunteers, with a view to ascertaining insights into the experiences of the material conditions for volunteering. Interviews were conducted in German, fully transcribed and coded using a content-analytical method of inductive categorisation, focusing on statements regarding the function and value of volunteering, motivation, affective investment, as well as the drawing of boundaries between volunteering and other activities, especially waged work. English translations of interview segments are my own.

Findings

Volunteering as unique: Lay roles and affective engagement

Theresa works part-time for a local council in north-east Germany coordinating community projects. Additionally, she volunteers as a family mentor, supporting one or at most two families with a newborn baby within the first six months to a year of the child’s life. Her value practice involves freely giving advice and assistance. Theresa’s ethos rests on her belief that empathy cannot be imposed, and she places a strong emphasis on an intrinsic motivation to help others:

Volunteers decide themselves to act. It’s not the local council telling people to. That wouldn’t be right. It comes from below, from the people, from the heart.

Programme coordinator Nadine thinks that because volunteers are unremunerated laypersons, their affective disposition towards the families is neither transactional with a view to earning money nor informed by the requirements of statutory social work. Not only do the families appreciate the ethos that motivates volunteers, but the federal funding body is also keen on what Nadine terms the ‘specific characteristics of volunteering’:

Parents appreciate someone freely giving their time. It’s not that someone from social services visits, but that someone visits who enjoys doing so and wants to pass on their knowledge and experience. [. . .] That it really is voluntary, that it’s not their job to earn money, that it’s a matter of the heart to support the local families. [. . .] That’s why the programme will remain voluntary, which is also what the ministry of health wants.

Birgit is a social worker who coordinates volunteers in the south-west of Germany in a similar initiative, albeit a social enterprise funded primarily by donations. For Birgit, the specific relationship of trust between volunteer and family, which she attributes to its informality, is crucial. There are two sides to her explanation. On the one hand, volunteers have a different affective disposition to social workers: they are not conditioned by professional training to maintain an emotional distance, nor are they under pressure to manage multiple cases and large workloads. On the other hand, because the normative context is different and volunteers are not acting on behalf of authorities as statutory social workers would be, families are less on their guard:

A social worker would need much longer to obtain a level of trust, because of the distance that exists. [Between the volunteer and the family] it’s an encounter on the same level without a hierarchy, both sides are happy about being in contact with one another [. . .] and even though as a professional I [. . .] freely choose to work in the area I work in, enjoy the work with the families and find it meaningful, internally I have to keep a distance.

The voluntary nature of the relationships is key to the value that these activities have for the organisations too. As Payne (2002) discusses, volunteers’ position as laypersons serves to flatten hierarchies and make services more accessible. In comparison to professional or waged workers, volunteers are expected to draw on their personal experience as opposed to professional training to forge relationships deemed ‘warm’ (Eliasoph, 2011, p. 118) and provide care that is considered ‘less impersonal’ (van Bochove et al., 2018, p. 393). In the case of the family mentors, the value practice is more akin to that of a friend or member of an extended family than a social worker. At the same time, the expectation that volunteers will be mothers themselves (although not a strict requirement) reinforces gendered responsibilities for care.

Nonetheless, the emotional entanglement and moral expectations are not the same as they would be if participants were related to one another, enabling new kinds of social relationships beyond the familial. A role emerges for the volunteer to act as a kind of bridge (Hoad, 2002) between the state, society and the family. This bridging function is ambiguous: it is assistive where the volunteer connects families to social services, if necessary, but it also encompasses an element of social control where volunteers would be expected to report back to the programme coordinators if they witnessed anything untoward in the households they visit (e.g. neglect or violence). Moreover, the volunteer is positioned vis-a-vis the families they mentor as someone with more knowledge and experience, which can place a strain on relationships in the case of disagreement or divergent expectations. Consequently, the relationships between volunteers and service users are not necessarily always as egalitarian as the programme coordinator Birgit suggests. If power and hierarchies are not made explicit, they may be pushed into the background and more difficult to address, as Kirkegaard and Andersen (2018) observed in the context of mental health services in Denmark. And while the family mentor does not replace a social worker but provides a discrete service (Cameron et al., 2022), this is not a standalone activity. In the bridging function discussed, the voluntary role is embedded within the landscape of social services. Nonetheless, this example is indicative of how in the dual crisis of care, new roles may emerge for volunteers, whereby the volunteer has a novel function with characteristics that exceed both professional and family roles.

Volunteering as a personal relationship: Substituting the help of family members

Martina also acts as a kind of bridge. She works part-time as an administrator for a local council and volunteers for a different local council advising older persons who need to make changes to their homes due to increased immobility or disability. She helps them determine their needs and access the practical and financial support they are entitled to. Martina utilises her knowledge of administrative procedures acquired in her paid job, but she draws a boundary between her occupation and her voluntary role. She changes her ethos and affective disposition; important to her value practice as a volunteer is the independent advice she offers:

As a volunteer I’m impartial. Someone from the local council necessarily represents the authorities and all their rules and regulations. I can offer a broader perspective. I can point out to someone that they might have a right to a claim they hadn’t yet considered; I can tell them that they should file a complaint if their application is rejected – insurance providers often reject things outright, then you must complain and then they revise their decision. [. . .] In my job I must adhere to my employer’s perspective, which is fine. But when I’m volunteering, I can be a bit freer. If the rules about that were to change, I’d have to reconsider my volunteering activities.

By ‘impartial’ Martina means that she is neither committed to the council nor to insurance providers or companies providing services. Her sense of autonomy is key. If the council were to start telling her what to do, she would stop volunteering. For Martina volunteering is not only about helping older persons; older persons can themselves volunteer as a way of avoiding loneliness:

Today there are so many people who are alone. Sometimes they don’t really have a family. Or have family who have moved far away. And then an older woman sits there all alone. And if there’s a social network – I always call [volunteering] a bit of a social network – that can only be an advantage, absolutely. And that’s why there are now more of these voluntary initiatives.

While Martina refers to the family situation of potential volunteers, her notion of the ‘social network’ makes clear that she has a sense of volunteering’s function in enabling sociality beyond close family ties in a context of a crisis of social reproduction where the latter are waning.

Gerhard is retired and runs a volunteer repair service in a south-west German town. The repair service is entirely comprised of retired (male) mechanics, plumbers, electricians and carpenters looking to do something meaningful with their time and skills. They often mend items a commercial repair service would consider obsolete, including items with sentimental value:

Someone called us because her video player no longer worked. She had some old VHS tapes she wanted to watch as a way of cherishing her deceased husband’s memory. These are the kinds of things we do. [. . .] In the past [. . .] the family lived close by. That’s a huge problem today. The children live far away.

The ethos and affective disposition of the volunteers is premised on the fact that as retirees, they have time and their decisions regarding what to repair do not have to be commercially viable. They can thus focus on what people need or want, not what they can pay for. In Gerhard’s view, the repair service does not substitute commercial repair services but steps in for missing friends, neighbours or family members.

Common to the value practices in these examples is the non-obligatory quality of the affective bonds, as is the autonomy volunteers feel they exercise. A further commonality is a propensity to step in where there is no family member to do so. In these cases, the substitution effect of volunteering is directed towards reconfiguring informal care arrangements in the wake of a crisis of social reproduction, rather than replacing professionals or waged workers.

The value of additional time: Providing emotional support in under-resourced circumstances

Henriette has spent many years volunteering as a chaperone for a charity in the south-west of Germany. On behalf of social services, the charity supports children during supervised visits with a parent. Like Martina, Henriette also regards herself to be impartial, neither involved in the ongoing familial conflict, nor representative of the court or social services. Where social workers and psychologists carry out formal assessments, Henriette ensures the child’s wellbeing prior to, during and after a visit. Even more so than in the case of the family mentors, this is ambiguous. Henriette provides emotional support to the child, but she may also report to her supervisor any observations she has that could be relevant to the case. This gives her discretionary power to exercise influence based on her own personal views and assumptions about the children and families she meets. Humphris (2019) has argued in the context of voluntary refugee support in the UK that precisely because volunteers are not accountable in the same way as waged or professional staff, they may be more likely to prioritise private assessments of behaviour over rights and entitlements.

The main factor in Henriette’s understanding of her role, however, is time. In comparison to a social worker, she thinks she has more time with the children, which improves the quality of the relationships and informs her value practice:

Many things would be different in terms of the contact with the families [. . .]; paid staff would never be able to commit the time that we as volunteers are able to commit.

Despite Henriette’s emphasis on the unique character of her voluntary work, there is some ambivalence when she points out that in the past a social worker did what she does today, implying that her voluntary role reflects a cost-mitigation measure in response to the funding crisis of the welfare state. The fact that Henriette has the time volunteer has to do with her material background. While today she is of retirement age, the economic security of her husband’s income enabled her many years of volunteering. Similarly to the family mentors, she also draws on her knowledge and experience as a mother (and grandmother) when chaperoning. The role thus relies on gendered responsibilities for care. At the same time, she explains that volunteering is important to her sense of self because the gendered expectations of women of her generation meant it was not possible to have a career. As a volunteer Henriette has a sense of autonomy and opportunities for self-actualisation, even if her gendered role as a carer is reinforced.

Susanne is a programme coordinator for a denominational welfare association in north-east Germany. One role for volunteers is to mentor children struggling at school. Here too, the specific quality of the voluntary relationship is central to the role and informs the value practice. Susanne clearly distinguishes between the teacher and volunteer. Teachers maintain full responsibility for the children’s education, while the volunteer provides additional emotional and practical support. The volunteer has more scope than the teacher to develop a personal relationship with the child:

In cases where [. . .] a child has an identified learning disability, then we are clear with the volunteers that the teachers are responsible [. . .]. That aside, volunteers have an entirely different approach. They can do things in a much more playful manner. [They] have more leeway to focus on whatever the individual child needs. They can simply say, ‘OK – you seem to be upset about something today, let’s talk about that and do the reading exercises next time.’ [With the volunteer] there’s an additional person there to help. [. . .] Especially in cases where a child is struggling, it can be very important for the child to have the freedom to practise reading and writing without having to worry about making mistakes [. . .], being graded by the teacher or even laughed at by other pupils.

According to Susanne, a teacher’s professional training and ethos shape their affective disposition. As a figure of authority with an obligation to ensure the delivery of the curriculum, the teacher must maintain more distance and formality. Yet, the two decisive factors here are once more time and workload: the current working conditions in the education sector mean teachers are managing very large classes. This limits the time and capacity to deal with children who might need additional help. The volunteer’s role is different to that of a teacher, but part of the function is relief for an under-resourced education system in crisis.

In the case of school mentors and child chaperones there is a tension in the demarcation of the volunteering role. The role is constructed as an augmentation of an existing service (Cameron et al., 2022) by virtue of the volunteers’ value practices. Yet, there is also an awareness that volunteers are compensating for staff’s lack of time due to funding shortages.

Care beyond rationalisation: Reclaiming connection as a compensatory practice

Programme coordinator Susanne is acutely aware of the crisis of waged care work, expressed here in the time pressures faced by paid staff across education, health and social care. She thinks that this ongoing crisis is creating a new demand for volunteers:

I do notice that calls for volunteers are getting louder. [. . .] Take for example care homes. Care workers used to have more time to talk to residents. Now they face such time constraints they can’t do that anymore. So, volunteers are called on to do that bit of the job. [. . .] I do think that current developments minimise [the time for caring] while using volunteers to pick up the slack. This is a real shame for paid staff. They probably went into the job because they wanted to engage with elderly people, not because they wanted to wash them.

Susanne’s sentiment concurs with Hannelore’s experiences. Hannelore is retired and volunteers in a care home in the south-west of Germany. She originally trained in eldercare but quit because she felt the medicalisation of the paid role left too little scope for eldercare’s social, relational and interactive dimensions. For Hannelore, these were the joyful aspects:

Ten or perhaps 15 years ago eldercare training changed. All the nice things – well, the things that I thought were nice and that many of the other care workers I worked with enjoyed too – were simply taken out and the sole focus became the medical aspects. The nice things, like physical movement, memory training, handicrafts or other things that you can do with old people, were for the most part omitted from the training. That was one of the reasons I quit. I was so angry that everything that was about human connection or that was fun, was side-lined.

Hannelore was critical of what she saw as a redefinition of the responsibilities and affective disposition of eldercare to prioritise the medical dimensions associated with expertise, skill and training. Interlinking developments in the German care sector account for Susanne and Hannelore’s concerns. From the mid-1990s onwards, training became more specialised with the growing complexity of care needs in an ageing society, while calls grew louder from within nursing to increase its professional status and enhance its attractiveness as an area of employment (Evans et al., 2023, p. 17; cf. Overgaard, 2015). In the early 2000s nursing science was established as an academic discipline with degree programmes (Kälbe & Pundt, 2016, p. 44). As a result, medical and coordinative expertise were rendered more important for qualified nursing staff, while there has been a further stratification of jobs in the care sector. Alongside these reforms, the introduction of standardised time and tasks metrics has transformed caring into a sum of measurable tasks quantified in units of time (like dressing someone or changing a catheter). Finally, time and resource pressures lead to staff having to prioritise the most necessary tasks (Krenn, 2014). Taken together, these developments explain the squeeze on the social, relational and affective aspects of eldercare that Hannelore regards so highly and that are an expression of the crisis of waged care work that is part of the dual crisis of care.

Here, volunteers do not directly substitute paid staff, instead they assist them by taking on certain tasks and freeing up their time for those aspects of the job that are considered core to nursing (Overgaard, 2015, p. 386). Based on research in the Netherlands, van Bochove et al. (2018, p. 406) argue that the increased role for volunteers in health and social care corresponds to a change in the role of paid staff whose tasks become more specialist or coordinative. While these authors point to how this can ‘upgrade rather than downgrade the status of social service professionals’ (p. 407), my findings point to the downsides experienced due to routinisation, standardisation and rationalisation.

So too in Benjamin’s case. Benjamin is a former paramedic who quit his job at a hospital because of an increasing sense of alienation amidst a growing crisis of waged care work. He first volunteered and now works for a charity offering a volunteer-run ambulance service for the terminally ill to ‘fulfil a final wish’ and visit a place, event or person special to them. Volunteers require a medical background and are usually trained nurses or paramedics often still working full-time in their occupations. In Benjamin’s view the quality of the relationship forged is key:

Benjamin:

[Patients] talk about what they associate with the place we take them to, the place they want to go to; then they talk about their lives, all those everyday matters. [Volunteers] notice too that there is less distance between them and the person they are accompanying. They still behave professionally, but you can’t keep the same kind of distance that you would working at the hospital or for the ambulance service. This is much more intimate.

Interviewer:

And that’s because it’s voluntary?

Benjamin:

No. no. [It’s that] we only have this one person to tend to, we have time [. . .] and we are much closer to the people and their relatives. During the trip we might also go for dinner with them or something like that [. . .].

Once again, the determining factor is the time a volunteer can dedicate. Benjamin reflects on why professionals might seek out volunteering opportunities even when there are such staff shortages in the health and social care sector:

Benjamin:

Often professionals volunteer in similar areas to their paid work. Whether it’s this project or whether it’s volunteering in a care home. It’s the professionals doing additional volunteering. But it’s quite paradoxical: On the one hand there are so many vacancies in the sector that can’t be filled, including in the ambulance services, but then people opt to volunteer [. . .].

Interviewer:

Why do you think that someone who is already working for the ambulance service would volunteer in addition to their job?

Benjamin:

[. . .] As I said, I did like my job at the hospital, but all things considered: It’s a factory. For sure, you do make time for interpersonal moments, say if a patient is afraid of receiving an anaesthetic or something like that. Of course, we would take the time to tend to someone, you’re not entirely numb and are still empathetic. But I would have never had the time that I have here. This is stress free. And it really is very rewarding.

Benjamin’s reflections suggest that medical professionals and care workers turn to volunteering as a way of reclaiming time to care from the standardisation and resources pressures interlinked with the crisis-prone neoliberal restructuring and capitalist organisation of their workplaces – articulated here in the metaphor of the factory that Benjamin uses to describe the hospital he worked at. As Thompson and Bono (1992) found in their study of volunteer firefighters in the United States, volunteering can be a way to cope with feelings of alienation that are otherwise experienced. Striking here is that volunteers are choosing not to do something different from their occupation when volunteering. They choose to do something very similar, as a way of reclaiming the affective experience they miss at work. Benjamin’s description of how voluntary work enables him to sustain the kind of caring ethos and affective disposition undermined in his paid paramedic job demonstrates how the imposition of capitalist logics impedes the value practices of care (Skeggs, 2014, p. 17), but also how volunteering acts as a compensatory measure for the crisis of waged care work.

Negotiating boundaries: Gatekeeping and emotion management

Boundary-work is a core element of Susanne’s role as programme coordinator. As Cameron et al. (2022) point out, part of the role of coordinators can be to protect the uniqueness of the volunteer contribution. Susanne acts as a gatekeeper in cases where she thinks volunteers may have ulterior motives as well as where organisations might be looking to cut costs:

There are people who call [. . .] and the first thing they ask is how high the expense allowance is. I honestly have to say that I reject these requests. I can totally understand how someone who doesn’t have a job needs to earn money. I really do understand this. But I have to say that I don’t think volunteering should be about earning money.

For Susanne, the transactional nature of the monetised relationship runs counter to the value practice of volunteering. She is concerned that poverty due to long-term unemployment or a low pension (both of which are symptomatic of a crisis of social reproduction) can compel people to volunteer in order to access the monetary incentives on offer. In her view this undermines the ethos of volunteering. At the same time, Susanne is also concerned about the motives of organisations who call her:

I want to know why the organisation is looking for a volunteer, what the volunteer’s role would be and why the task is considered appropriate for a volunteer. I ask a lot of questions and sometimes I simply have to tell the caller that in my view what they’re offering is not a suitable role for a volunteer or that I wouldn’t be able to find someone willing to do what they’re offering as a volunteer.

Susanne considers the use of volunteers to cut costs unethical. Should a voluntary position be inappropriate in her estimation, she rejects the request.

Boundary-work can also pertain to personal boundaries. As Payne (2002) and van Bochove et al. (2018) acknowledge, volunteers run the risk of emotional over-involvement, often precisely because of the non-professional nature of the voluntary role, such that they require support in protecting personal boundaries. Volunteer programmes in Germany today offer supervision for volunteers to better manage emotional and practical boundaries to safeguard their wellbeing and avoid burnout (BMFSFJ, n.d.). This is indicative of the greater formalisation of volunteering as it is inserted into the dual crisis of care. Here, an aspect of professional conduct, in this case emotion management techniques, crosses over into the voluntary realm.

Volunteers also develop their own impromptu mechanisms of emotion management. This is so in Miriam’s case. Miriam works part-time in graphic design and volunteers as a minibus driver in a rural part of south-west Germany. The minibus service is aimed at assisting the mobility of older persons and is supported by the local council. It runs several times a day connecting both the town’s care home and its residential areas with local amenities. Miriam distinguishes her value practices as a volunteer bus driver from those she associates with the paid role. She is certain that she forges more personal relationships with her passengers than a ‘normal’ bus driver. This is because she provides proactive assistance and support, helping people on and off the bus and even stopping along the route where there is no designated pickup point. Part of her ethos is to check in with her passengers, ask how they are and take the time to chat with them. At Christmas and Easter, she bakes cookies for them. Plus, she invests emotionally in their wellbeing: once she returned to the village by car after her shift because she was worried about someone who had not been on the bus on the way back. Evident too is that Miriam perceives the lack of time constraints as key to her voluntary role. Just like the other volunteers discussed above, Miriam repeatedly stressed in the interview that precisely because she was a volunteer she had the time to focus on her relationships with the passengers.

Miriam distinguishes between her level of emotional investment and that of a paid bus driver. At the same time, if a passenger is rude or unreasonable, her protective measure is to distance herself internally and outwardly act reserved. Her boundary-work consists of behaving how she thinks a paid bus driver would:

[. . .] if someone is impolite or disrespectful, then I just step back a bit and put some distance between us. I call on my inner bus driver and don’t respond [laughs].

Miriam’s flight into the affective disposition she associates with waged work constitutes a coping strategy to protect her in difficult interpersonal situations. Her projection of what she imagines the boundaries of occupational conduct to be serves as an orientation that allows her both to transgress and fall back on such boundaries, depending on the situation she is trying to navigate.

Defending boundaries: Task differentiation and resignification

There are also instances where boundary-work pertains to the minutiae of tasks. Care home volunteer Hannelore is very exact in her circumscriptions: she maintains a boundary ‘upwards’ vis-a-vis professional tasks and ‘downwards’ vis-a-vis menial ones. Hannelore engages in ‘dual closure’ (Witz cited in Overgaard, 2015, p. 382). She does not interfere with what she considers the nurses’ remit, but she also does not do anything that resembles the drudgeries of housework. As Hoad (2002) discusses, an important aspect of the voluntary ethos is not wanting to feel used or instrumentalised, or be reduced to merely carrying out menial tasks. For Hannelore, voluntary tasks should be enjoyable (while she is also acutely aware of the crisis of waged care work, as discussed in a previous section):

The paid staff in the care home have clear job profiles. What I do is mostly is the fun stuff [. . .] but if I thought I was just a glorified cleaner while at home the piles of washing were waiting for me, that wouldn’t work for me either. [. . .] I said from the start that I wouldn’t do that kind of thing – like cleaning windows, for example.

Nevertheless, volunteers can appreciate even the most mundane task. At a municipal library in south-west Germany volunteers read to children and help re-shelve books. They thereby free up staff time to focus on more specialist tasks. Corinna is a housewife with two teenage children who has been volunteering at the library two to three hours a week for several years. When her children were very young, re-shelving books was a meditative break from the everyday stress of overburdening reproductive labour. She enjoys re-shelving books precisely because it requires no expertise and has no responsibility attached to it (plus, she often discovers interesting new books or films). Even though her children are now teenagers, the library is still her sanctuary:

With two small children, I had the feeling I was going a bit mad. [Volunteering at the library] was just so enjoyable. It was a calm, chilled and sensual activity. That’s how I first started and why I still do it. My kids are not young anymore, they’re no longer such a handful, but I still like to volunteer at the library. I like it here when it’s quiet and there’s not much happening.

Library manager Laura explains that while the library might nominally save some staff hours by using volunteers, they spend staff hours managing them. They must advertise for and interview volunteers, correspond with them and manage their activities and expectations. Plus, the library must absorb the fall-out from the vagaries of volunteering that constitute the flipside of the voluntary ethos: volunteers cannot be told what to do in the same way that staff can, and they might not always show up as arranged, precisely because they are not bound by the obligations of employment. In terms of cost and benefit, the library breaks even:

If you weigh up what we put in and what we get out of it [the volunteer programme at the library] there’s not really much difference. The critical question is, therefore, who benefits? I think the main benefit for us lies in our relationship with the local community [. . .] not in the work that’s done.

This case demonstrates how much boundaries depend on the meaning participants give to specific arrangements. This is linked both to the content and context of the respective tasks, whether from the perspective of the organisation or the personal situation of the volunteer. From the organisational perspective of the municipal library, volunteering is not promoted to compensate for staff shortages left by funding cuts, but is a service offered to residents who want to get involved in the local community. Because of her personal situation, from Corinna’s perspective volunteering offers respite from the domestic chores and caring responsibilities that are ascribed to her in her gendered role within the household, along with some time to call her own. Where the task of re-shelving books is quite menial, a process of resignification occurs such that the activity is attributed value beyond the immediate meaning of the task itself.

Conclusion

In the wake of a dual crisis of care across the sphere of social reproduction and waged care work and precipitated by a combination of demographic change and neoliberal restructuring, voluntary work acquires multiple functions. Volunteers step in to provide support for paid staff, especially where the latter have limited time to care. Elements of caring for which there is no time (and that historically have never been considered to require skill, training or expertise) are siphoned off to the auspices of volunteering. By filling in gaps, volunteers provide relief for overburdened services. Yet this has mixed effects for staff, whose compromised working conditions may be normalised as a result. On the other side, volunteers can replace missing informal care and support within family contexts, thereby contributing to the reconfiguration of informal care. Volunteering programmes have the potential for a reorganisation of social reproduction and care beyond the familialism that has so far remained an unquestioned pillar of the conservative-corporatist welfare regime in Germany. Yet, in the cases explored in this article, existing gendered responsibilities for care were overwhelmingly reinforced, even if some aspects of social reproduction were taken out of the family context.

When asked about the difference between waged work and volunteering, respondents repeatedly mentioned time – time they thought was lacking in waged work. Especially relevant here is the link between time and care: it takes time to form personal relationships and tend to individual needs. Under inadequate working conditions, the time to care is both off-loaded and reclaimed in the realms of volunteering. Yet, who has the time to volunteer? A central concern for the programme coordinators interviewed here was that they struggled to recruit volunteers. Consequently, as Verhoeven and van Bochove (2018, p. 798) have suggested for the Dutch context, off-loading the responsibility for care and welfare provision to volunteers is limited by the fact that these volunteers are not easy to find. One explanation for this is that in capitalist economies subsistence is connected to waged labour that takes up considerable time (Taylor, 2004, p. 43). Hence, individuals who are available to volunteer are often in positions of relative economic security. In most of the cases discussed in this article, volunteers did not engage in waged work or worked part-time. In addition, they could either rely on a partner’s salary or were retired and in receipt of an adequate pension. Such relative economic security also gives volunteers the agency to shape the volunteering experience on their own terms. If what is unique about volunteering is that it is freely chosen and not obligated, then systemic reliance on volunteers to provide basic services becomes difficult: should volunteers feel imposed upon or abused, or if their volunteering starts to feel too much like waged work, they will stop volunteering (unless, of course, they are otherwise compelled). Indeed, recent research found that attempts in a UK charity to introduce productivity targets and performance metrics, thus aligning voluntary work with the logics of waged work, elicited considerable unease among volunteers (Read, 2021).

The increased turn to volunteers elicits three types of boundary-work. The first type involves an insistence on volunteering as unique with regard to its value practices. This is because the relationships established by volunteers follow a different affective logic to those in waged work contexts or that are based on professional codes of conduct. While the allusion to volunteering’s unique qualities has been criticised in the sociological literature as an ideological smokescreen for austerity and privatisation (Muehlebach, 2012), the fact that individuals affirm voluntary activities as opportunities to engage in care and experience a sense of autonomy and self-determination should not be disregarded. A second type of boundary work constitutes volunteering as compensatory activity in response to the pressures in paid care work. Staff in these occupations sometimes seek out volunteering opportunities in their areas of expertise to compensate for the alienation they experience in their jobs. This is informative of the problems that currently exist in waged care work and what it is that matters to individuals who work in these jobs. Third, boundary work is explicitly directed against instrumental uses. Observable is a defence of volunteering through closure and resignification. Volunteers do not want to do work they think someone should be paid for (Kelemen et al., 2017), nor do they want to feel used by being given menial tasks (Hoad, 2002). Meanwhile, coordinators act as gatekeepers in their defence, thereby contributing to the further formalisation of volunteering. In sum, although volunteering in the contemporary German welfare regime goes some way towards stabilising a dual crisis of care, it is far from offering a sustainable solution. This would require a much more fundamental reassessment of welfare and public service provision and of the current distribution of time, labour and wealth.