Introduction: organisations that involve volunteers

Volunteers have been called the lifeblood of the VCS (NCVO, 2010). Volunteering occurs in all sectors of the economy but most volunteers in England and Wales (an estimated two thirds) give help through VCSOs (Low et al, 2007). The sector is fluid and diverse in the extreme. There are arguments about where its boundaries lie and, indeed, if it can reasonably be called a ‘sector’ (Halfpenny and Reid, 2002). It has been famously and picturesquely denoted as a ‘loose and baggy monster’ (Kendall and Knapp, 1995, p 67). More prosaically, it is ‘complex in the sense that there are a great many types of organisations of different sizes and structures, doing many different things in many different ways’ (Chapman et al, 2009, p 14). The recent momentum gained by ‘social enterprise’ and ‘social entrepreneurship’ has, controversially, expanded the category to include organisations that pursue social goals through practices and attitudes more usually associated with for-profit businesses (Shaw and Carter, 2007; Di Domenico et al, 2009; Dey, 2010). Our focus here is on organisations in the VCS, including social enterprises, that provide care. As the quotation above reminds us, even VCSOs that involve many volunteers and take their support and management very seriously exist for the sake of their beneficiaries, not their volunteers.

Over the past two decades in the UK, especially in England, local government and health services have been required to step up their engagement with charities, social enterprises and community organisations. Under New Labour, there were heightened expectations that VCSOs would advance government priorities, including citizen engagement, social cohesion, supporting employability through volunteering and improving public services. The role of VCSOs came to the centre of debates about public service reform and in the 2010 General Election all the major parties stressed the importance of VCSOs in public services (Alcock, 2010).