This article is intended as the leading article in a Special Issue of Voluntas devoted to episodic volunteering from a cross-cultural perspective. This article focuses on summarizing and distilling knowledge about episodic volunteering. Based on a thorough literature review, the authors present state-of-the-art knowledge about episodic volunteering divided into key subsections that include: (1) is episodic volunteering a new area or a new era in volunteering? (2) Defining the concept of episodic volunteering, (3) the singularity of episodic volunteering, (4) assessment of the domains where episodic volunteering is most prevalent, (5) the impact of episodic volunteering on the participating individuals, (6) new parties in volunteer organizations, and (7) managing episodic volunteers. Finally, we present current gaps in our knowledge of episodic volunteers, some of which will be covered in this Special Issue, especially understanding episodic volunteering in non-English-speaking countries.

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have increasingly adopted business‐like practices as a response to institutional pressures. Some researchers argue that this development leads to mission drift, whereas others find a positive effect on organizational performance. However, the institutional pressures responsible for shaping the nonprofit sector have remained hard to distinguish from each other. This study explores the consequences of mimetic, normative, and coercive pressures, and looks at how they affect managerialism, organizational performance, and mission drift. We link these concepts through a structural equation model based on survey data and find that one aspect of managerialism, strategic behavior, is a key construct in influencing the response to isomorphic pressures and can positively affect organizational performance while holding off‐mission drift. Normative isomorphism even has a direct positive effect on organizational performance. Mission drift can take place when organizations are under coercive pressure without having strategies or internal processes in place. These findings imply that organizations should invest in their strategy and the professional development of their staff to increase organizational performance and avoid mission drift.

Although episodic volunteering is a popular form of volunteering and has received increasing attention from researchers, the motives and characteristics of episodic volunteers in different industries or types of events remain underresearched, especially in the context of cultural events. This study is based on a sample of more than 2000 episodic volunteers and analyzes demographic characteristics, motives, and volunteer experience of cultural event volunteers by applying between and within analysis. The between analysis compares cultural and social event volunteers and finds that cultural event volunteers show higher time engagement but are more self-serving in their motives. The within analysis emphasizes intrinsic motives over extrinsic motives, leading to the conclusion that saturation of extrinsic motives reduces willingness for future engagements.

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) often find themselves under pressure to invest all of their available income in mission-related activities rather than in capacity building. We investigate one factor that can influence the decision to invest in such capacity-building tasks: funding sources pursued by an organization. Drawing on the benefits theory of nonprofit finance, we take these funding sources as predetermined by an organization’s mission and propose an extension of the theory by linking it to economic multitasking theory, which states that organizations prioritize tasks that offer greater and more measurable rewards. Through regression analyses of survey data from Swiss nonprofits, we analyze the extent to which funding sources sought affect the amount of effort invested in three areas of capacity building: public relations, impact focus, and resource attraction parameters. The results support the predictions of multitasking theory by showing that the effort invested in certain capacity-building tasks is affected considerably by seeking a specific funding source. The effects are stronger for resource attraction-related tasks than for tasks closer to the service delivery of NPOs. The results indicate that an organization’s mission affects not only the available funding sources but also the extent to which an organization invests in its capacities, which can lead to a ‘lock-in’ status for organizations.

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