The study of volunteerism has generated multiple conceptual frameworks yet no integrated theory has emerged. This article identifies three major challenges, or layers of complexity, that a unified theory of volunteering faces. First, volunteering is a complex phenomenon that has permeable boundaries and spans a wide variety of activities, organizations, and sectors. Second, different disciplines attribute different meanings and functions to volunteering. Third, existing theoretical accounts are biased toward covering the 'laws of volunteering' and have a strong empirical surplus.'Good theory' however is multidimensional so there is a need to include other views on theory. To overcome these challenges, we use a 'hybrid theoretical strategy' that seeks to combine the 'multiple goodness' of current approaches. Our hybrid framework builds on the three layers of complexity identified, and provides an innovative conceptual system of navigation to map, compare, and integrate existing theories more adequately.

This research takes the utilitarian view of volunteering as a starting point; for a student population we posit that volunteering is motivated for career enhancing and job prospects. In those countries where volunteering signals positive characteristics of students and helps advance their careers, we hypothesize that their volunteer participation will be higher. Furthermore, regardless of the signaling value of volunteering, those students who volunteer for utilitarian reasons will be more likely to volunteer but will exhibit less timeintensive volunteering. Using survey data from 12 countries (n=9,482) we examine our hypotheses related to motivations to volunteer, volunteer participation, and country differences. Findings suggest that students

Volunteering is perceived as important for creating social capital and civil society, and therefore has become a fundamental part of social policies across most Western countries. In this article, we examine the involvement of governments, corporations and educational institutes in encouraging volunteering, and pinpoint their role in developing volunteering circles. Based on essential concepts presented here (volunteerability and recruitability), we develop the third-party model, and show how third parties get involved. We identify new ways in which these parties can enhance volunteering, and discuss their impact on volunteerability and recruitability. The potential negative impacts of volunteerism and ways in which these can be ameliorated are also acknowledged. Finally, issues that arise due to such involvement are also discussed, thereby offering an important contribution to social policy research in the area of volunteerism.

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Voluntary participation is connected to cultural, political, religious and social contexts. Social and societal factors can provide opportunities, expectations and requirements for voluntary activity, as well as influence the values and norms promoting this. These contexts are especially central in the case of voluntary participation among students as they are often responding to the societal demands for building a career and qualifying for future assignments and/or government requirements for completing community service. This article questions how cultural values affect attitudes towards volunteerism, using data from an empirical research project on student volunteering activity in 13 countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific region. The findings indicate that there are differences in motivation between countries which represent different cultural values. This article sets these findings in context by comparing structural and cultural factors which may influence volunteerism within each country.

In present-day societies, the extent to which young people still participate in civic life is an important matter of concern. The claim of a generational "decline" in civic engagement has been contested, and interchanged with the notion of a "replacement" of traditional engagement by new types of participation, and the emergence of the "monitorial citizen" who participates in more individualized ways. Concurrently, this study explored the assumption of a "pluralization" of involvement, advancing a new concept: the "civic omnivore", characterized by an expanded civic repertoire. Drawing data from a sample of 1493 Belgian and Dutch university students, we identify five repertoires of participation: disengaged students, classical volunteers, humanitarian citizens, monitorial citizens, and civic omnivores. (Hooghe, 2003a;McFarland & Thomas, 2006;Verba, et al., 1995).It follows that if such a generational shift is occurring, it could have detrimental consequences for Western societies -as large stocks of social capital are positively associated with healthy democracies, high levels of institutional performance, economic wealth, and social well-being (Knack & Keefer, 1997;Putnam, 1993). Consequently, the stakes are high, and a growing number of studies worldwide are devoted to assessing the level and nature of social and political involvement among youth (see, among others, Flanagan, et al

This article presents an empirical evaluation of the current debate on the changing nature of volunteering in the light of sociological modernization theories. Focusing on the cultural bases of volunteerism, a representative sample of 652 Flemish Red Cross volunteers is grouped according to a multidimensional set of attitudinal measures. The Unconditional, Critical, Reliable, and Distant dispositional clusters that emerge from the analysis cohere with distinct patterns of volunteering, ranging from core to peripheral volunteer positions. Furthermore, both cultural modernization indicators and organizational features account for the dispositional variations observed. Although the analysis conducted clearly reveals the surplus value of a multidimensional sight on volunteering, the research outcomes warn against a too-strong focus on "grand modernization narratives." The cultural bases of Flemish Red Cross volunteering may best be understood in terms of a threefold dynamic: Differences in cultural frames of reference intervene with life cycle effects and processes of organizational socialization.

The scholarly exploration of "volunteering" has mainly focused on identifying its antecedents or consequences, in order to facilitate the management and promotion of volunteering. In this dominant stream of research, the phenomenon of volunteering thus remains a "black box"-a takenfor-granted and fixed reality. The article sets out to open the black box of "volunteering" by not accepting it as a fixed, unproblematic object, but by exploring volunteering as a constructed phenomenon whose boundaries are managed and utilized by a variety of actors. To deconstruct volunteering, the article utilizes the Latourian notions of "hybridization" and "purification" as simultaneous and entangled mechanisms. We critically review the literature on "volunteering" and problematize the fundamental properties of the "pure" perception of "volunteering," their hybridization and eventual purification. The article concludes by highlighting how the constant tension between hybridization and purification mechanisms is in fact what makes volunteering proliferate as a phenomenon that has an increasing public significance in contemporary society. During the last three decades, there has been a burgeoning public interest in "volunteering". This interest is regularly expressed by state agencies and international bodies, corporations, and influential nonprofits, which often represent and promote volunteering as a highly glorified route for participating in civic life and contributing to the public good. An adjacent proliferating terrain is the growing scholarly work on volunteering, which often produces