Accounting for the Varieties of Volunteering

For a long time, volunteering lacked standardized data sets allowing methodologically robust comparative analyses and global policy making. Starting from 2011, the International Labour Office (ILO) and the United Nations (UN) have provided global statistical standards for organization-based and direct volunteering which offer path-breaking opportunities.

The global statistical standards on volunteering are however only relatively known. They also have to face difficult methodological and substantial challenges: Can they really account for the local varieties of volunteering in the different areas of the world? Does their adoption further develop our knowledge of volunteering both at national and international level?

Beyond illustrating which innovations these statistical standards bring and critically assessing the tensions between the global guidelines and the local differences, the book shows how the ILO and the UN standards can be implemented into national statisticsand which advancements in the understanding of characters, antecedents and impacts of contemporary organization-based and direct volunteering they allow. The Volume takes Italy as an illustrative case that offers global value.

This multidisciplinary book demonstrates that a holistic approach to the implementation of the ILO and UN guidelines permits to virtuously balance international statistical standards and locally embedded cultures as well as to move knowledge of volunteering forward in a complexity-driven agenda. The book provides tools, evidences and inspiration for scholars, statistical agencies, practitioners and policy-makers.

Riccardo Guidi,

BA/MA in Political Science and PhD in Sociology, is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science of University of Pisa where currently teaches Organization of Social Services and Sociology of Third Sector. He gave lectures at the National Technical University of Athens (Greece), Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) and Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences (Latvia), chaired Sessions, presented and discussed Papers at ISTR, ISA, ESPANET, ECPR, ESWRA and IPA Conferences. Formerly, he was Scientific Director and Senior Researcher of Volunteering and Participation Foundation (Italy) (2009-2014). His research interests are about volunteering, sustainable community movement organizations and social work. About these topics he has published monographies and edited books, journal articles, and book chapters.

Ksenija Fonović,

BA/MRes, works with CSV Lazio - regional Volunteer Support Centre based in Rome, Italy. She spearheaded efforts to promote the implementation of the ILO Manual for the Measurement of Volunteer Work through EVMP – European Volunteer Measurement Project in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. She was responsible for stakeholders’ engagement in the three-year EU funded research project “Third Sector Impact” coordinated by Bernard Enjolras. She coordinated a collaborative practice led research “Volunteering across Europe. Organisations, promotion, participation” and edited the collection of country reports in English and in Italian. She contributed to various European civil society projects resulting in policy recommendations. Since 2018, PhD candidate at the University of Münster with Prof. Annette Zimmer.

Tania Cappadozzi,

BSc/MSc in Statistics, is Executive officer in the Division for population register, demographic and living conditions statistics of the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). Since 2009 she isthe Unit Chief of the Italian Time Use Survey and since 2011 she is the Scientific Responsible and Unit Chief of the ILO Module on voluntary work (Unpaid activities of benefit to others). Her research activities concern, in particular, unpaid work: both household work and volunteer work. She is a member of the UN Expert Working Group on the revision of ICATUS, member of the UNECE Task Force on Valuing Unpaid Household Service, member of the Eurostat Task Force for reviewing the EU Time Use Guidelines 2020 and of the Istat Consultative Committee on the permanent Census of Non Profit Institutions.