ENGAGEMENT UND ERWERBSARBEIT IN EUROPA - BBE

evers: changes in work and human services and their impact on volunteering
Let us look first on mainstream services, like schools,
kindergardens or the various care services offered to
frail elderly people. Within the respective communities
of experts in these fields it has become quite obvious
that when striving for better quality and efficiency,
much depends from the degree such institutions and
their service patterns are able to stimulate coproduction
and coresponsibilities on the side of their addressees.
When the willingness to activate them meets
with their desires for participation a critical mass for
changing cultures of services builds up. Beside the traditional
service culture of schools ,home care services
concepts of labour market services one can find today
various concepts of services that include the coproduction
and cooperation of volunteers and voluntary
based associations – on meetings of the school community
where parents are volunteering together as
well as in homes for the elderly that include offers on
a voluntary base such as mobility services and reading
books. Such a perspective that makes voluntary action
part of coping strategies has obviously found even
more grounds when it comes to services and networks
that deal with groups at risk. There is a broad field for
mixing and sharing and for a new type of professionalism
that knows how to activate and integrate the potentials
of voluntary cooperation into arrangements of
everydaylife in a service society.
Summing up one can observe patterns of a new service
culture that is participative and empowering not only
with respect to the individual users but as well when it
comes to the role of groups, communities and citizens.
Activating voluntary elements becomes herein a sign
of a new professionalism rather than a relict of older
times where volunteering was mainly about gap filling
in areas neglected by the welfare state.
threads to be faced
We have already touched upon the modern world
of work. Risks and dangers get into sight here, to
the degree the present forms of dissolution of the
old boundaries that defined, separated and in some
way as well restricted the world of work from other
spheres of life go along with processes that may be
called “desecurization”. By desecurization I mean
those processes where work can not anymore get civilized
to some degree as this has been experienced
by the former attempts of welfare state to regulate
it, creating thereby a background of material and
symbolic securities.
There are many forms of such a desecurization; let
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me give you just some examples: constant threads
of getting unemployed and to fall out of the security
networks combined with work, kinds of flexibilizing
work that are onesided insofar they mirror the need
to be constantly at the disposal of the employer
instead of an increasing possibility to choose working
hours according to one´s own private and social
needs; furthermore rising insecurities as they result
from short term labour contracts and from challenges
for constant mobility. But what about chances to
meet together when working time patterns multiply
and may change from day to day?,
These diverse items have in common that they reduce
those background securities much of the traditional
volunteering of the better off classes could
build on - an own income and property for some
and a socially secured job for others. And it may be
one reason why - as many studies show - social and
political participation and the respective voluntary
engagement is significantly higher among the better
off and more secured with more autonomy.
However the fact that so much depends on the job is
not only felt by those who miss it but as well by those
who want to keep it and turn it into a career. There
are plenty of studies showing that people tend to see
everything under the aspect of their career –volunteering
as well. Careercentred concepts of a work life
balance may however not only restrict the readiness
to volunteer but change as well the motivations for
doing so. How to judge much of those commitments
documented in diplomas, people attach nowadays in
their job applications? Instrumentalizing volunteering
for job concerns might add up to the danger that in
our societies, as Wuthnow has remarked, volunteering
is anyway increasingly debated under the aspect
of one s own concerns and interest. With respect to
this some of the models of volunteering that have
been developed by firms alongside with getting a high
profile on corporate social responsibility are highly
questionable. No doubt that being at some weekends
under a bridge with homeless people is an event that
gives managers of a firm to think about their life; but
to what degree is this helpful as well for the homeless
they have met and talked to? But let us take another
example: volunteer schemes get as well recommended
for the long term unemployed. This may be helpful
for both sides the volunteers and the ones´ they
address. It shows however as well another aspect of
the ways the worlds of labour and the worlds of volunteer
engagement are intermeshed these days.