Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: -New Roles Expected to Volunteer Probation Officers in Japan-
Background: The probation service in Japan has a long histry of community involvement in the community-based treatment for offenders. Today, volunteer probation officers(VPOs), engaged in rehabilitation services for offenders, are expected to support victims through using of their knowledge about the community and social resources.
Objectives: To examine the VPOs’ opinion and the advantages about the matter mentioned above.
Method: 3,000 VPOs, selected randomly nationwide, were targeted in the mail survey. Out of these, the number of VPOs actually surveyed came to 2,260, the response rate was 75.3%.
Result of the survey: While many VPOs recognize that it is important to advise about the victim related matters to parolees and probationers, few VPOs perform as a facilitator for victim-offender mediation. On the other hand, there are some VPOs who perform many valuable services related to victim support in the local community. Those VPOs could be promising victim supporters.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Current scholarship on identification and disidentification does not fully explain the complex ways in which non-standard organizational members, like volunteers, negotiate their attachment to an organization. This study examines the unique tensions of identification that characterize spontaneous volunteers who gave their time during the disaster relief efforts following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We locate a mechanism of organizational attachment in “volunteer speak,” a rhetorical strategy used by volunteers to find comfort in high stress, disaster situations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: ‘Volunteering’ is a key feature of participatory development initiatives in many cities of the South. In an attempt to engage beneficiaries as agents of their own development, Non-Governmental Organizations recruit women residing in slums as volunteers, and trains them to achieve project goals. This paper is based on an ethnographic study of volunteering practices in a slum in Kolkata, India. I critically examine the practice of volunteering in order to see in what ways economically poor women are defined in the process. I demonstrate that women in slums are recruited as volunteers because they are primarily perceived as ‘housewives’ and women with sufficient ‘free time’. This representation is tied to feminization of poor women’s labor. Despite being involved in wage work, poor women’s work is rendered invisible, as their work is considered a natural extension of their homes. Consequently, women living in slums are understood to be natural volunteers and volunteering is seen as inherent to their domestic lives. Volunteering is therefore a gendered practice. Voluntary participation is a feminized domain that rules out the participation of poor women as ‘workers’. Despite successfully improving women’s health conditions, volunteering practices ends up constructing and reproducing normative gender identifications.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: That “crisis of work” theories have inadequately interrogated such forms of work as volunteering and neglected the growth in political attention paid to their economic relevance is contrasted by studies that aim to tease out the value of and purpose behind volunteering’s labor, its cultural connotation, and the study of its social-attainment effects. In this study we look at the "crisis of work" account by Sennett and use data on volunteers to examine some of his assumptions about labor in the new cultural economy. Rather than assuming, with Gorz and others, that we are moving beyond a workplace-based society, we argue that alternative forms of creative work, which are both individually and collectively enhancing, are moving into the zone of work. Whether these change the subjective meanings of volunteering and the meaning of work as labor is a matter for investigation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper investigates the connection between a congregation's political and theological ideology and the number of social service programs that are present in that congregation. Using the 1998 National Congregations Study (NCS), OLS regression is performed to analyze the factors that affect how many programs are run out of a particular church (N=1168). Results indicate that greater liberalism (on a combined political and theological ideology scale) increases the number of social service programs. Another important factor is the proportion of active adult members who volunteer for such programs and the percentage of members who hold four-year college degrees. These findings suggest, contrary to some current political thought, that faith-based initiatives are most likely to be successful in connection with large liberal Protestant churches rather than the more conservative congregations that are often the target of such policy.