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This study examines the social network ties, motivations, and experiences of highstakes volunteers (HSVs): individuals who fulfill long-term, consistent, and intense time commitments providing medical, social, and/or psychological assistance. Interview, focus group, and observational data from three settings (volunteer firefighting, victims' services/advocacy, outreach for at-risk youth) were analyzed using qualitative methods. Accordingly, five types of HSVs (stable lifer, imbalanced lifer, conventionalist, professional, crusader) are presented and discussed. These findings advance theoretical insight into the variety of individuals who take on HSV roles and contribute to growing scholarship on diversified approaches to volunteer management.

Though temporary work arrangements have garnered increased attention among scholars and practitioners, there has been little research into internal interim leaders (i.e. interims hired from within the organization) as a distinct case of temporary worker and leader. Internal interims are a fixture in organizational leadership and often serve during critical periods of change. As such, it is important to examine these leaders' actions and the social, organizational, and individual dynamics that inform them. Toward this end, the present study examines the sensemaking processes of 24 internal interims using a qualitative approach. We describe five distinct sensemaking processes (dutiful, traditional, aspiring, reluctant, and self-conscious) shared by the 24 participants and discuss how several social dynamics (message valence and consistency) and individual factors (prior leadership and future aspirations) influenced these divergent processes. Further, we contend that internal interims adopt more passive (caretaking) or proactive (trailblazing) styles of leadership based on these socially and individually informed sensemaking processes. Finally, we highlight directions for future research (motivating factors for serving as an internal interim, experiences with stigma and alienation, and processes of identity formation and identification) that may concomitantly enhance our understandings of internal interims as well as temporary workers and leaders at large.

This study explicates dialectical tensions in volunteer-manager communication stemming from the contested nature of volunteering and fluidity of volunteer membership. Interviews and observations of volunteers and supervisors in three nonprofit organizational contexts revealed four central tensions that are dialectical in nature: an attraction-adjustment dialectic in the socialization of prospective and new volunteers, an ownership-oversight dialectic regarding volunteer-manager negotiation of volunteer agency and autonomy, a formalization-flexibility dialectic concerning managerial expressions of expectations for volunteer performance and commitment, and an intimacy-distance dialectic pertaining to the scope and bounds of volunteers' relationships within and outside their respective organizations. Based on these findings, we offer insight into how volunteers and managers might envision these tensions constructively as complementary dialectics. We also suggest starting points for future communication-centered theory and research on volunteer management.

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