Introduction

The UK government has recently turned attention towards the voluntary sector and volunteering is now high on the social policy agenda. The value of volunteers has been recognised primarily as a means of providing services in the emerging mixed economy of welfare, but also in less concrete terms as contributing to an active and participatory society (Davis Smith, 1998). A number of authors have discussed the links between volunteering and active citizenship (Kearns, 1995; Turner, 2001), but some have recently argued that while the government is encouraging and supporting volunteering, changes in policy and regulatory procedures could actually be discouraging it (for example, Milligan and Fyfe, 2005). Authors have argued strongly that the voluntary sector is being transformed by the increasing encroachment of new managerial concepts and tools (Bondi, 2005; Fyfe, 2005), for example, the Labour government voluntary sector compacts launched in 1998, which require new standards, guidelines and reporting mechanisms for voluntary organisations (Home Office, 1998). The attendant push towards increasing professionalism and bureaucratisation faced by these organisations is placing pressures on their relationships with both volunteers and the wider community. This chapter explores these changing relationships in the context of charity shops in contemporary Britain.

This chapter also aims to contribute to a wider project of exploring the spatial dimensions of voluntarism. It takes on a perspective that acknowledges that spaces are brought into being, negotiated and interpreted through social practices and discourses. An exploration of the organisational spaces of charity shops on these terms views them as key sites where government policy, public discourse and volunteer experiences come together and are transformed. As such the chapter begins with a consideration of recent volunteer-focused government policies. It then examines recent changes within the charity retail sector, focusing in particular on the (re)formation of the spaces of charity shops themselves. There has been a tendency for what were once relatively informal (domestic) sites of voluntary activity to be recast as professional, work-inflected sites. The chapter then focuses on the volunteers’ experiences and interpretations of volunteering in these evolving environments. The core of volunteers tends to value the informal ‘domestic’ character of these spaces and prioritise the social benefits of volunteering. Such experiences suggest that government discourses around volunteering as a form of active citizenship may be problematic.