Description
Book SynopsisExploring contradictions between the democratic rhetoric of empowerment programs and the bureaucratic hurdles that volunteers learn to navigate, this book demonstrates that empowerment projects work best with less precarious funding, more careful planning, and mandatory training, reflection, and long-term commitments from volunteers.
Trade ReviewWinner of a 2014 Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award "Sociologist Eliasoph reports on her participant-as-observer study focusing on the use of volunteers in empowerment programs for disadvantaged youth. The work is a critical analysis of government and privately funded empowerment programs... Eliasoph writes well, and the text is within the reach of most adult readers."--Choice "The book is written to appeal to a general audience but should be of particular interest to many organizational scholars and practitioners. It is especially relevant to those studying or leading organizations that seek to blend multiple missions, to integrate participants across racial, ethnic, or class boundaries, or to empower their participants in some way. For these readers, the book provides many valuable interpretive nuggets, as well as exhibiting a keen eye for detecting empty talk and gesture."--Tim Bartley, Administrative Science Quarterly "I find a lot to recommend in Making Volunteers. The writing is engaging, and Eliasoph makes several valuable contributions to the study of non-profits, organizations, volunteering, and civic culture. Beyond scholars in these and related areas, faculty whose courses include service learning projects, as well as funders, paid organizers, and potential volunteers for Empowerment Programs would be well served to read Making Volunteers and heed its lessons."--Jennifer L. Glanville, Political Science Quarterly "Ethnographic research on volunteering is thin on the ground. This is surprising considering that the nature of charitable work, which is the lifeblood of so many communities, has proved so elusive to pin down in official statistics. Nina Eliasoph's new book, Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End, therefore, is an important addition to the canon of literature which explains how people live the experience of voluntary action."--Jon Dean, Voluntas "Eliasoph ... concludes the book with an excellent (if difficult) series of recommendations for stakeholders involved in the world of empowerment projects as they currently exist. Project organizers, external funders, and government administrators should heed them. Projects with fewer contradiction-laden, empowerment-talk-driven, mega-events and more frank recognition of real needs and structural differences could avoid current harms and perhaps even reach some positive outcomes."--Matthew Baggetta, Public Administration
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: Empower Yourself ix Chapter 1: How to Learn Something in an Empowerment Project 1 Part One: Cultivating Open Civic Equality Chapter 2: Participating under Unequal Auspices 17 Chapter 3: "The Spirit that Moves Inside You": Puzzles of Using Volunteering to Cure the Volunteer's Problems 48 Chapter 4: Temporal Leapfrog: Puzzles of Timing 55 Chapter 5: Democracy Minus Disagreement, Civic Skills Minus Politics, Blank "Reflections" 87 Part Two: Cultivating Intimate Comfort and Safety Chapter 6: Harmless and Destructive Plug-in Volunteers 117 Chapter 7: Paid Organizers Creating Temporally Finite, Intimate, Family-like Attachments 146 Chapter 8:: Publicly Questioning Need: Food, Safety, and Comfort 152 Chapter 9:: Drawing on Shared Experience in a Divided Society: Getting People Out of Their "Clumps" 165 Part Three: Celebrating Our Diverse, Multicultural Community Chapter 10: "Getting Out of Your Box" versus "Preserving a Culture": Two Opposed Ways of "Appreciating Cultural Diversity" 183 Chapter 11: Tell Us about Your Culture: What Participants Count as "Culture" 190 Chapter 12: Celebrating ... Empowerment Projects! 206 Conclusion: Finding Patterns in the "Open and Undefined" Organization 231 Appendix 1: On Justification 259 Appendix 2: Methods of Taking Field Notes and Making Them Tell a Story 261 Notes 265 References 281 Index 303
