1 Introduction to event volunteering
Karen A. Smith, Tom Baum, Kirsten Holmes and Leonie Lockstone-Binney
DOI: 10.4324/9780203385906-1
We will never forget the smiles, the kindness and the support of the wonderful volunteers, the much-needed heroes of these Games.
(International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge)
Thousands of volunteers now have the right to carry the phrase āI made London 2012ā with them as a badge of honour.
(Chair of the London 2012 Olympic Organisation Committee Sebastian Coe)
The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games involved over 70,000 Games Makers and, in their speeches at the Closing Ceremony, both Jacque Rogge and Sebastian Coe continued a tradition of praising and thanking these volunteers, who had been instrumental in making the event a success.
From the Olympic Games to local community festivals, a diverse range of events are heavily dependent on volunteers for their operations. There are multiple reasons for involving volunteers at events. Volunteers can make sense economically, cutting the operational costs of hosting (Strigas and Jackson 2003); indeed, without volunteers, many events would not even take place. Volunteers can also bring enthusiasm and skills, and contribute to visitor satisfaction and community support for events (Ralston et al. 2005). While volunteering at events is by no means a new phenomenon and is acknowledged in the literature as a form of episodic volunteering (MacDuff 1991), there is little doubt that the recognition of the significance of volunteering to events ā in a wider social, economic and demographic context ā has gained considerable traction in recent years. This book is designed as testament to growing academic and practitioner interest in understanding event volunteers, their contribution, the roles that they play and the motives that drive them to commit to unpaid and (sometimes) unloved work on behalf of major and small-scale events.
This volume contains twelve core chapters, which each attest to the importance of event volunteers. Contributions address both ends of the events scale spectrum: mega and global events alongside more localised and community-scale festivals. They are drawn from experiences in Europe and Australasia, but the stories that they tell resonate beyond the specific countries of the case examples and have application on a much wider geographical scale. Consciously, the book does not address event volunteering in parts of the world where this phenomenon has limited tradition or where its cultural origins are significantly different from that of the majority of contributions here. We feel that themes that are drawn from event volunteering experience in China (host of the 2008 Olympic Games); South Africa (hosts of the 2010 FIFA World Cup); and Brazil (hosts to the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games), among other countries, present opportunities for a complementary or companion volume to our own. This wider cultural context of volunteering in general, and event volunteering as a specific phenomenon, is a theme of major ā but under-researched ā significance, as we shall highlight in our conclusions. That said, this volume contains sufficient diversity in event types (and in their location) to have value as a learning resource for both researchers and those entrusted with managing the volunteer resource at events and festivals.
The purpose of this opening chapter is to provide an introduction to event volunteering by first discussing the concept of volunteering. Five approaches to classifying events are briefly considered ā by type, scale, frequency, location and ownership ā as each has implications for how volunteers are involved and managed. The growth of event volunteering research is reviewed. Analysis of fifty-nine event volunteering articles reveals the dominant areas of research in terms of event classifications, themes and methods. The structure of the volume and the twelve chapters are then introduced. The concluding chapter will return to these themes and set out a research agenda that builds on previous work on sport event volunteering by Green and Chalip (1998) and Baum and Lockstone (2007a).
Event volunteering
Volunteering is a multi-dimensional concept (Cnaan et al. 1996); defining volunteering is complex and there is no consensus on what the term means (Cuskelly et al. 2004). Well-cited work by Cnaan et al. (1996: 371) identifies four dimensions of volunteering: free choice, remuneration, structure and intended beneficiaries. Each dimension is a continuum: structure captures both formal and informal volunteering (with the former done through an organisation); free choice ranges from free will, to relatively uncoerced, to obligation to volunteer; remuneration goes from none at all, none expected, expenses reimbursed, to stipend/low pay; and the intended beneficiaries are those that the volunteering benefits or helps: others/strangers, friends or relatives and oneself. This results in a spectrum of volunteering: from āpureā forms of volunteering, over which there is general agreement, to ābroadā definitions and forms of volunteering, where there is more debate. For example, the latter includes volunteering involving monetary payments, such as internships with event organisations, where volunteers receive a stipend payment (Holmes and Smith 2009).
In this volume, and in event volunteering literature more generally, the focus is on formal volunteering done through an event organisation. Some studies of event volunteering offer a definition of volunteering, for example Monga (2006: 47) defines volunteers as: āpeople who offer their labour, knowledge, skills, and experience at no wage cost to the utilising organizationā. However, the majority of papers do not explicitly define volunteering in relation to the literature and instead, researchers typically adopt the event organiserās classification of these workers as volunteers. As a consequence, event volunteering can involve broader forms of volunteering, such as āobligatedā service volunteering, where students volunteer and gain academic credit (Holmes and Smith 2009). In their Model of Tourism Volunteer Engagements, Holmes and Smith (ibid.: 40) also include the dimension of time, or the nature of the volunteer contribution. They identify ongoing, seasonal and episodic time commitments, and event volunteering typifies the latter: episodic volunteering that is infrequent, occasional or short term. The rising popularity of episodic volunteering has been linked to both demographic changes and a desire for more flexible volunteering opportunities (Gaskin 2003; Holmes and Smith 2009).
Event organisations are well placed to respond to the episodic volunteering trend because, by their very nature, they are temporary or occasional occurrences (Getz 2005). While some event organisations will involve volunteers in ongoing roles throughout the year, the majority of event volunteers are involved on a temporary basis in order to deliver the event.
Classifying events
Events are extremely diverse and can be classified in a range of ways (see, for example, Getz 2008), including by type, scale, frequency, location and ownership or business model. Each of these classifi...
