Ends and Means

February 4, 2011 by
Filed under: Social Economy 

Do the ends justify the means?

There has been much discussion recently on how to get more people to volunteer but how important a goal is this? How much would we be willing to sacrifice to see this goal achieved? My guess is that the answer for most people would be “not much”.

Matthew Taylor has written on his misgivings on what he calls “involunteering” i.e. forcing people to volunteer.

I recently read two pieces of research which found that more people would volunteer if there was more income inequality and if people were less satisfied with public services.

I am certainly not saying that we should hope for either, however, these observations do raise lots of questions about how much of a goal increased volunteering really is.

Indeed, perhaps one of the (many) PR problems with Cameron’s idea of The Big Society is that it appears to be both a means (reforming public services, training community organisers etc…) and an end (people feeling more responsible for their area and more empowered). Without making this split clear it’s hard for us to debate which means we are or are not willing to tolerate for which ends.

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  • http://twitter.com/noelito noelito

    Think the Big Society seems to be framed too much towards voluntarism as an ethos as opposed to reciprocity. It might be useful to distinguish volunteers that don’t have a democratic stake in the service they’re helping out with and volunteers that do. I am a volunteer in helping deliver a service and a volunteer in advocacy groups. But in both instances I have a democratic stake in the direction of those services/groups. For example, a stake to collectively decide what services are provided and how the supply chain should work in the service. And in the other, a stake in shaping what type of activities, we organise, who we involve and so on. It’s not a case of the quantity of volunteering, but of the quality of relationship with the group you’re involved in.

    Should volunteers have a say in the activities they’re volunteering in and if so, do there need to be specific democratic architectures (i.e. coops) to enable this, or are there more innovative ways of enabling volunteers to have a say?

  • http://twitter.com/noelito noelito

    Think the Big Society seems to be framed too much towards voluntarism as an ethos as opposed to reciprocity. It might be useful to distinguish volunteers that don’t have a democratic stake in the service they’re helping out with and volunteers that do. I am a volunteer in helping deliver a service and a volunteer in advocacy groups. But in both instances I have a democratic stake in the direction of those services/groups. For example, a stake to collectively decide what services are provided and how the supply chain should work in the service. And in the other, a stake in shaping what type of activities, we organise, who we involve and so on. It’s not a case of the quantity of volunteering, but of the quality of relationship with the group you’re involved in.

    Should volunteers have a say in the activities they’re volunteering in and if so, do there need to be specific democratic architectures (i.e. coops) to enable this, or are there more innovative ways of enabling volunteers to have a say?