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 takenfor-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. During the last three decades, there has been a burgeoning public interest in "volunteering". This interest is regularly expressed by state agencies and international bodies, corporations, and influential nonprofits, which often represent and promote volunteering as a highly glorified route for participating in civic life and contributing to the public good. An adjacent proliferating terrain is the growing scholarly work on volunteering, which often produces

This article argues that the nonprofit case for corporate volunteering is complex, requiring a multi-level perspective on the outcomes for nonprofit organizations (NPOs). To develop this perspective, we adopted an inductive research approach, conducting 39 exploratory semistructured interviews with NPO staff. We argue that NPO scholars and practitioners should disentangle individual and organizational-level outcomes resulting from interactions between corporate volunteers and NPO staff, as such micro-dynamics ultimately affect NPO services.Moreover, these outcomes are subject to conditions at the organizational level (e.g., involvement of intermediaries), as well as at the individual level (e.g., type of assignment).Our study highlights the complexity that should be considered when addressing the fundamental question of whether corporate volunteering contributes to the ability of NPOs to provide their services, and under what conditions. We therefore propose that corporate volunteer management within NPOs is inherently, albeit contingently, intertwined with the services that these organizations provide.Keywords: corporate volunteering, nonprofit case, qualitative, multi-level. Corporate volunteering and NPOs Corporate volunteering and NPOs 3Despite the fundamental challenges that corporate volunteering poses to the functioning of NPOs, previous studies have tended to focus on the business case for such activities (Allen, 2003). In other words, they address the outcomes of corporate volunteering for corporations and their employees (Rodell et al., 2015). In recent years, however, some scholars have begun to develop the nonprofit case for corporate volunteering (Allen, 2003;Samuel, Wolf & Schilling, 2013;Schiller & Almog-Bar, 2013) by exploring the reasons that NPOs have for being involved in corporate volunteering and the outcomes that they realize from such relationships. Existing research proceeds from the general assumption that corporate volunteering should contribute to realizing the NPO's mission and that the benefits should outweigh the costs (Allen, 2003;Harris, 2012). Such "bottom-line tests" (Allen, 2003, p.58) have proven highly complex, however, much more so than the usual general outcome assessments. The nonprofit case for corporate volunteering thus warrants further scrutiny.In this study, we demonstrate that understanding the nonprofit case for corporate volunteering requires systematically disentangling outcomes at multiple levels (see also Rodell et al., 2015), paying additional attention to relationships between individual-level and organizational-level outcomes, and identifying particular characteristics that act as antecedents for these outcomes (see also the framework for the business case developed by Rodell et al., 2015, p. 9). A multi-level perspective on the antecedents to and outcomes of corporate volunteering could help NPOs to develop strategies for engaging corporate volunteers in ways that would maximize their own benefits (see Allen, 2003;Samuel et al., 2013). While many ex...

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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.

Corporate volunteering is an activity located at the intersection of the corporate and nonprofit spheres. Its coordination and implementation create interesting encounters between professionals from both sectors. This article adopts a pragmatic sociological approach to analysing the discursive processes that nurture or hinder these encounters and the corporate volunteering activities they aim to produce. It brings to the fore the nonprofit perspective by analysing 39 semi-structured interviews with Dutch and Belgian nonprofit professionals who were engaged in corporate volunteering coordination. The study shows that a flexible and project-oriented justification regime, which is mainly promoted by nonprofits that match companies with other nonprofits, creates a common discursive terrain that nurtures cross-sectoral collaboration. Other justification regimes, particularly the civic one, are increasingly marginalised, as they are perceived as hindering collaboration rather than enabling it. Thus the proliferation of corporate volunteering, and the dominance of the project-oriented justification that is intertwined with it, together challenge classical identifications of the nonprofit sector with civic action.