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Despite the practical need to cultivate individuals' engagement with nonprofit organizations and theoretical interest in volunteerism across multiple disciplines and perspectives, the conceptual boundaries of volunteering remain vague. Although definitions from the literature emphasize free will, lack of financial gain, and benefit to others, they do not consider how volunteers might integrate, negotiate, or reject these meanings when the demands of freedom and contribution collide. This study adopts a hybrid phenomenological perspective to explore what organizational volunteering meant to volunteers themselves. The findings show that the meanings that participants gave to volunteering were both agentic and relational and that volunteers negotiated agency and relationality in a dynamic way. The article discusses the theoretical implications for how researchers define organizational volunteering and the meaning of work in nonstandard work environments, as well as the practical implications for volunteer management.

This article employs a boundary work framework to analyze how volunteers from two nonprofit human services organizations navigated the tensions between volunteerism and professionalism. Based on interview data and analysis of organizational documents, the study found that volunteers at the first organization, fundraisers for child health promotion and parent education, dichotomized volunteerism and professionalism as incompatible social systems with divergent objectives, practices, and tools. Volunteers at the second organization, which provides emergency ambulance services, engaged in constant boundary crossing, oscillating between a volunteer and professional approach to tasks and relationships depending on the context. In both cases, paid staff and members of the public affected participants' ability to engage in boundary work. The study offers insights for nonprofit organizations wishing to professionalize their volunteer workforce by specifying how volunteer job types, organizational structure, and interactional partners' feedback impact volunteers' ability to engage in boundary crossing, passing, and boundary spanning.

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