Modalities of agency in a corporate volunteering program: Cultivating a resource of neoliberal governmentality

Abstract

Recent scholarly discussions on agency relate the concept to privilege, affect and subject formation, while challenging its equation with resistance to structural limitations. This article utilizes these discussions in a new terrain of ethnographic exploration: the engagement of corporate volunteers with underprivileged youth, coordinated by a transnational nonprofit that relies on corporate sponsorship. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic study that followed these activities in the US, Belgium and Israel, the article describes how corporate volunteers and coordinators projected an individualized and optimistic agency onto the beneficiaries of their activity, while perceiving their own agency as limited despite their privileged position. The simultaneous use of these two contradictory notions of agency governs employees’ engagement at work and their ideological adherence to corporate capitalism, making ‘agency’ a resource of neoliberal governmentality. These ethnographic insights contribute to explaining why corporations are increasingly interested in promoting volunteering as a salient Corporate Social Responsibility strategy.

The Roles and Intersections of Constrained Labour Agency

“…When we take up roles, and perform these according to our own and to others’ expectations, we change ourselves and the roles in the process (Clark 2022; Jaeggi 2014). Individual agency is thus performed both when norms are resisted and when they are conformed to (Shachar and Hustinx 2019). For many people, an increasing number of roles are made available throughout life—becoming a partner, a parent, an employee, or taking on organisational responsibilities—which allow them to exert power, expose them to domination, and/or let them maintain privilege.…”

Opening Up the “Black Box” of “Volunteering”: On Hybridization and Purification in Volunteering Research and Promotion

“…4 A more complex set of motivations was identified, for example, in studies of corporate volunteering, where the motivations of employees to take part in volunteering activities are not only guided by a mix of altruistic and calculated or "egoistic" motivations, but were also scattered across a range of feelings of commitment-toward the company and fellow employees on the one hand, and toward the nonprofit involved and its beneficiaries on the other hand (Peloza & Hassay, 2006; see also Yeung, 2004). Such hybrid volunteering settings also produce differential modalities of agency among volunteers and beneficiaries, which satisfy corporate interests in volunteering as well as employees' aspiration to a sense of personal and professional meaningfulness (Shachar & Hustinx, 2017).…”

“…Especially in the United States, this bifurcation often overlaps with racial hierarchies (Krinsky & Simonet, 2017). Shachar and Hustinx (2017) showed how engagement of privileged corporate employees in volunteering programs even enables them to resolve potential emotional and ethical doubts regarding their privileged positions. The promise of "volunteering" to serve as a means to social inclusion thus seems to have a different realization, as "volunteering" is becoming another sphere through which social hierarchies are reproduced.…”

Settling the Neoliberal Contradiction through Corporate Volunteering: Governing Employees in the Era of Cognitive Capitalism

“…However, they perceived themselves and their organizations as unable to challenge these structures, suggesting that their activity in YS is “what we can do” and reaffirming YS individualistic consensus by claiming that “even if you can help one student somehow, it’s still worthwhile” (cf. Shachar and Hustinx 2017).…”