Who Cares? Toward an Integrated Theory of Volunteer Work
1997/10/01 by John Wilson, John F. Wilson, Marc Musick +1 · 1,404 citations
Engineering · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Engineering #Nonprofit Sector and Volunteering #Political science #Psychology #Public relations #Religion, Society, and Development #Social Capital and Networks #Sociology #Volunteer #Volunteer work #Work (physics)
paper · doi:10.2307/2657355
published in American Sociological Review 62(5), 694 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 1997/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/26
Abstract
The authors construct an integrated theory of formal and informal volunteer work based on the premises that volunteer work is (1) productive work that requires human capital, (2) collective behavior that requires social capital, and (3) ethically guided work that requires cultural capital. Using education, income and functional health to measure human capital, number of children in the household and informal social interaction to measure social capital, and religiosity to measure cultural capital, they estimate a model in which formal volunteering and informal helping are reciprocally related but connected in different ways to different forms of capital. Using two-wave data from the Americans' Changing Lives panel study, they find that formal volunteering is positively related to human capital, number of children in the household, informal social interaction and religiosity. Informal helping, such as helping a neighbor, is primarily determined by gender, age and health. Estimation of reciprocal effects reveals that formal volunteering has a positive effect on helping, but helping does not affect formal volunteering
Citations
Cited by
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- Social Networks and Civic Participation and Efficacy in Two Evangelical Protestant Churches
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- Can social capital remedy structural inequality? Economic mobility in a longitudinal population-scale social network
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- A port in a storm: Spontaneous volunteering and grassroots movements in Amsterdam. A resilient approach to the (European) refugee crisis
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- A Rapid Review of Barriers to Volunteering for Potentially Disadvantaged Groups and Implications for Health Inequalities
- Life Course, Gender, and Participation in Voluntary Organizations in Italy
- The Implications of Sex Differences on Volunteer Preferences
- The impact of religious involvement on trust, volunteering, and perceived cooperativeness: evidence from two British panels
- Volunteering Behaviors of People of Color in the US Communities: How Community Racial Composition Affects the Type of Organization People of Color Volunteer For
- Segregation in Religion Networks
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- The Factors Affecting Volunteers' Willingness to Participate in Disaster Preparedness. [europepmc]
- Psychosocial determinants of cardiovascular events among black Americans with chronic kidney disease or associated risk factors in the Jackson heart study. [europepmc]
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- Comparative Study on Volunteering among Older Korean Immigrants in the United States and Older Koreans in South Korea. [europepmc]
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