Paper short abstract:

The paper considers volunteering as part of the development of civil society and its increasing importance within transformations of welfare states. It analyses the ideological construction of volunteering as a form of care and its gendered implications.

Paper long abstract:

The promotion of civil society is a feature of contemporary neoliberal welfare restructuring. In many parts of the world, a diverse range of NGOs are increasingly important as providers of welfare, as governments promote volunteering as the answer to various social ills. In Central and Eastern Europe, civil society has been promoted as a key "development project" and a way of replacing or refocusing state support. This paper explores volunteering as a distinctive aspect of civil society development. It examines the integration of volunteering programs into publicly funded health care in the Czech Republic. This is based on an ethnographic study of hospital volunteering carried out in 2008. Hospital volunteering is performed almost exclusively by women, who provide non-expert care such as company and social activities to hospitalized patients. Of particular interest in this paper is the process whereby volunteers are constituted as particular kinds of carers. Volunteered care is distinct from both health care and kinship care. Unlike other, feminised forms of (health) care work, it is neither paid for, nor professionalised. Equally, models of kinship and motherhood only partially provide the moral framework for volunteering, and the care volunteers provide is neither obligated nor reciprocated. Rather volunteered care most closely approximates the ideology of the free gift. The paper draws out some theoretical implications for analysing gender and care in the context of welfare transformation.