“They Are Just Like You and Me”: Cultivating Volunteer Sympathy

Abstract

This study demonstrates the centrality of emotion work, especially sympathizing with beneficiaries of help, to sustaining volunteerism. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with 42 volunteers and paid volunteer coordinators, it explains how volunteers cultivate sympathy, and thus commitment to helping, by framing beneficiaries as deserving. Volunteers constructed recipients as "deserving" along three dimensions: neediness, blamelessness, and impressionability. However, challenges to deservingness disrupted sympathizing, thereby undercutting volunteers' commitment. But rather than quit, volunteers were able to salvage beneficiaries' deservingness by pointing to authority, elaborating on victimhood, relating beneficiaries to their family and friends, and universalizing risks. Engaging in emotion work reinvested volunteers in volunteering.

Connecting Practical Doings to Cultural Meanings: Exploring the Work of Moral Mediators in Human Service Organizations

“…Previous research on moral identity work in human services has focused on both the interactional work of paid workers (Bemiller and Williams ; Deeb‐Sossa ; Joffe ; Kleinman ; Kolb , ; Taylor, Turgeon, and Gross ) as well as volunteers (Froyum ; Germann Molz ; Grönlund ; Holden ; Rogers ; Stein ; Yanay and Yanay ). There is an emphasis on the personal work of constructing a moral identity through helping positions, seen in research on abortion clinic workers (Joffe ; Wolkomir and Powers 2007), domestic violence and sexual assault advocates and counselors (Kolb , ), welfare‐to‐work managers (Taylor, Turgeon, and Gross ), and homeless shelter volunteers and employees (Holden ; Rogers ).…”

“…There is an emphasis on the personal work of constructing a moral identity through helping positions, seen in research on abortion clinic workers (Joffe ; Wolkomir and Powers 2007), domestic violence and sexual assault advocates and counselors (Kolb , ), welfare‐to‐work managers (Taylor, Turgeon, and Gross ), and homeless shelter volunteers and employees (Holden ; Rogers ). Particularly relevant to this project is Froyum's () research that emphasizes the importance of sympathy for emotional rewards and sustained volunteerism. Through interviews with volunteers and paid volunteer coordinators, Froyum analyzes the ways “deservingness” of program recipients is constructed and the ways volunteers engage in emotion work to negotiate disruptions of deservingness and sympathy, often with assistance from volunteer coordinators.…”

“…In addition to underpaid direct human service work, volunteering provides another potential opportunity to construct a moral identity (Froyum ; Germann Molz ; Holden ; Kleinman ; Rogers ). Volunteers may rely on idealized understandings of making a difference in the world (Butcher and Smith ) and the “warm glow” or positive feelings about the self that come from giving to others (Andreoni ).…”

“…Volunteers may rely on idealized understandings of making a difference in the world (Butcher and Smith ) and the “warm glow” or positive feelings about the self that come from giving to others (Andreoni ). The emotional rewards of volunteering largely depend on volunteer feelings of sympathy toward beneficiaries; working with “deserving” clients may reaffirm a moral identity much more than working with those deemed “undeserving” (Froyum ).…”

“…When volunteers are unable to feel sympathy toward individuals organizationally defined as worthy and in need of help, they doubt their commitment (Froyum ). Stein's () ethnographic research on volunteer experiences in a soup kitchen and a food pantry demonstrates that volunteers expect to receive gratitude from clients; when a negative attitude or ingratitude is expressed, workers feel “ripped off.” Similarly, Yanay and Yanay () highlight the volunteer phenomenon of “dropping out,” which they argue is the outcome of disjunctures between “ought” and “actual” experiences.…”