ENGAGEMENT UND ERWERBSARBEIT IN EUROPA - BBE

evers: changes in work and human services and their impact on volunteering
with its convictions and models. We find a diversity
of lifestyles and cultural subgroups that mostly give
little or no guidance whether or not one should volunteer
or enter into civic engagement. The message
is: it´s up to you.
This correspond to the often observed fact that firm
social ties and obligations have corroded and given
way to forms of volunteering and civic engagement
that may not be less challenging or widespread, but
where the respective persons engaged make a reservation
as to the time and liability of their engagement;
likewise the simple question “what do I get
from this?” gets more important.
All these epochal processes and developments
brought along a central modern concept of volunteering
which nowadays gets dissolved to some degree.
This idea of a change that is concerning society
as a whole and which can not be attributed to one
single sector of it should be kept in mind. Because
the present changes in work and human services
and their impact on the inherited paradigm of volunteering
that I will discuss in the following should be
seen as a part of it. They are both causes and effects
for more global changes and what they entail for historical
concepts of volunteering.
3. twO basic trends: the waning bOundaries
Of labOur and the eVer grOwing iMpact Of
prOfessiOnalized huMan serVices – what
can be their iMpact On VOlunteering?
When taking up the first one of these two trends –
changes in paid work and labour markets –, two kind
of development seem for me to be central.
The first profound change is quite often described by
the term of the waning boundaries of labour. What
is meant by that? It is concerning the weakening of
a traditional model of placing paid work in our life
and of limiting the room given to paid work in our
everyday lives. This is concerning the way it is placed
over the life cycle, the possibility to give it a clear
beginning and end within a working day or by setting
limits to the orientations and values associated with
the world of labour so that they do not intrude into
community life. The first kind of dissolution of old
boundaries of labour have to do with the fact that
across the lifecycle the clear sequence and separation
of being in the phase of education and training,
being engaged in paid work and being on retirement
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are waning. The same holds true for the placement
of working times in everyday life with unorthodox
working times across the seven days/twentyfour
hours week getting more impact.
Less clear and effective boundaries between working
life and other dimensions of life may result as
well from the fact that on the one hand evermore
people are in contact with working life yet this
contact is taking to a lesser degree the form of a
regulated standard full post. Forms of contact with
the world of labour are increasing, that reach from
casual and part time work over to short term employment.
By all this the forms of linking living and
working get more diverse and this holds arguably
true as well for types of placing volunteering within
work life concepts. Former covering-all models of
work are giving room to all sorts of group-specific
and individual models.
The second big and sweeping change I want to discuss
here has to do with the dynamic expansion of
human services and their role in everyday-life. It is
experienced in areas such as professional child care
and in help and care for the increasing number of
frail elderly people but it is felt as well in the areas
of cultural and recreational services. By the metaphor
of “bowling alone” one aspect of this change
in the world of human services has got widespread
attention.
On the long way to the personal social services of today
there has always be an interaction of voluntary
based initiatives and statebased professional institutions.
Mostly the former took the lead, pioneering
the early hospitals, kindergardens and homes for
the elderly. Stepwise these became – on a “ladder of
extension” as the English intellectuals and social reformers
of the early 20th century, the Webbs, once
called it - mainstreamed, i.e. supported or taken
over by state institutions and professionalized. However
often voluntary contributions stayed part of
the new public services as it can be observed when
looking at school boards or support associations for
public services such as theatres or libraries. Besides
volunteering inside professional human services one
can find it as well outside the established institutions
of service providers taking the form of associations
that offer complementary forms of care on a
voluntary basis or such offers in sports and leisure.
The increase of human and more specifically many
social, health and educational services has chan-