Sport Policy in a Transformed Socio-Political Setting: The Case of Israel

This article describes the impact of socio-political transformation processes on sport policy through the Israeli experience. A framework was developed for analyzing learning processes, utilizing the argument that under highly centralized systems, citizens' preferences regarding any area of life, including sport, are strongly affected by governmental policy. We show that in Israel the lack of a significant sport policy during the centralized formative years of the State influenced citizens' long-term preferences regarding sport, in the sense that it was regarded as a marginal issue that did not trigger demands for policy change. We explain that the marginality of sport in Israeli society also continued when the nature of relations between citizens and politicians was transformed from a top-down to a bottom-up orientation.     

Barriers and Facilitators to Implementing Functional Family Therapy in a Community Setting: Client and Practitioner Perspectives

While Functional Family Therapy (FFT) is known to be effective in addressing adolescent behavioral problems, there has been little exploration of issues relevant to its transport from the tightly controlled setting of clinical trials into routine service delivery. This study sought the views of key stakeholders, clients, and practitioners, on barriers and facilitators to the successful implementation of FFT. Undertaken in a community setting in Scotland, interviews were carried out with 12 adolescents, 14 parents/caregivers, and 6 practitioners. Results focus on: Referral process and pre‐intervention contact; Engagement of families; Structure and delivery; Organizational factors. Although barriers to engagement were identified, FFT was viewed as an acceptable, appropriate and feasible intervention with the potential to improve adolescent wellbeing in ‘real‐world’ settings.     

The Octagon Model of Volunteer Motivation: Results of a Phenomenological Analysis

Individual motivation is the core of the actualization and continuity in voluntary work from both the standpoint of theoretical research and practical volunteerism. Volunteer motivation also provides an excellent research area for investigating the wider sociological theme of late-modern participation. This study, based on the data from 18 interviews, explores volunteer motivation utilizing a phenomenological approach to individual experience and the meaning of volunteerism. Using a phenomenological approach illuminates the nature of volunteer motivation more holistically. The research includes 767 motivational elements in 47 themes and develops an innovative four-dimensional octagon model of volunteer motivation—the theoretical and practical applications of which are discussed.     

Stability and Change in Nonprofit Organizations: The Volunteer Contribution

This paper reports on a study of the microprocesses of stability and change in a nonprofit welfare organization in Australia. We position volunteering and voluntarism as core constitutive phenomena in and of nonprofit organizations and the nonprofit sector more generally, and examine volunteer agency in action. Developing a model drawn from neoinstitutional theory and adopting an ethnographic approach, the paper illustrates theoretically and empirically how volunteers create and revise institutional orders operative within organizations in ways hitherto poorly articulated and understood.     

Projections and Policies for Volunteer Programs: The Implications of the Serve America Act for Volunteer Diversity and Management

This article explores the limits of public policy as it affects volunteerism in the United States. Our analysis focuses on the potential of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act (2009), the most sweeping volunteer legislation in U.S. history, to raise the level of volunteering and national service in the United States, particularly among young people, older people, and minorities—the primary target populations of the act. The Serve America Act aims to increase service‐learning opportunities and national service placements substantially. However, the long‐term impact of these changes on the rate of volunteering and the composition and character of the volunteering population remains unclear. Using data from the Current Population Survey's annual Supplement on Volunteering, we examine a variety of reasonable policy scenarios to see how the Serve America Act might affect future volunteering through the year 2050. The findings suggest that even if the Serve America Act is fully funded and implemented, it is unlikely to have a long‐term impact on the overall volunteering rate and, consequently, that altering the national volunteering rate might be an unrealistic public policy goal. Nevertheless, the analysis shows that because of naturally occurring changes in the population, the composition of the volunteer pool is likely to change as we move toward 2050—a demographic shift that will present increased challenges for volunteer managers. We discuss these challenges and how managers might deal with them effectively.     

Sources of Volunteer Motivation: Transformational Leadership and Personal Motives Influence Volunteer Outcomes

We examined the separate influences of volunteers' personal motives and their team leaders' behaviors on volunteer satisfaction and contributions, along with mediating processes suggested by self‐determination theory. Participants were 302 volunteers who worked in teams at various sites through a central agency. As predicted, both personal motives for volunteering and transformational leadership influenced volunteer satisfaction through enhanced work meaningfulness and higher‐quality team relationships. However, motives that predicted volunteer contribution were different from those that predicted satisfaction. Whereas satisfaction was positively associated with motives concerning esteem enhancement and value expression, contribution was positively associated with motives to gain understanding and negatively related to motives pertaining to esteem enhancement and social concerns. Transformational leadership was positively associated with volunteer satisfaction, but not with volunteer contributions. The theoretical ramifications of these findings are discussed, along with practical implications for the recruitment and retention of volunteers.     

The Aboriginal People: Literary Perspectives

There continues to be a worrying lack of material about family therapy with Aborigines, despite the massive difficulties experienced by Aboriginal people. A notable exception has been from Geraldine Slattery, whose original paper Transcultural Therapy with Aboriginal Families: Working with the Belief System was published by the Journal in 1987. Here Geraldine reviews two recent publications by University of Queensland Press, which has a long record of publishing about our Aboriginal citizens. While these books are not specifically focused on family therapy, their central relevance will be obvious. — Editor.     

The Situational Theory of Publics in a Different Cultural Setting: Consumer Publics in Singapore

In an ever-globalizing world, it behooves one to ask whether, and if so to what extent, the theoretical constructs developed primarily in Western democracies are applicable elsewhere. This study used the Situational theory of publics to assess the communication behaviors of a sample of Singaporeans vis-à-vis the level of customer service in the retail sector. The study surveyed 242 retail customers and conducted 3 focus groups of retail consumers. Results revealed that the situational theory was quite useful in identifying the communication behaviors of consumer publics in Singapore. A majority of the respondents perceived high problem recognition but also displayed constrained behavior in responding to the problem. Only a few respondents exhibited activist behavior as described in the theory. Cultural factors such as deference to authority and collectivism played a significant role in the constrained behaviors of the respondents. We contend that the referent criterion, abandoned for over 2 decades, helps include culture as an independent variable in the theory.     

The Preparation of Volunteer Workers With Adolescent Groups

The Victorian Association of Youth Clubs is a voluntary organization, the primary function of which is the provision of consultative services and training programmes for volunteer workers to locally based and autonomous youth clubs.² These clubs are admitted to affiliation with the Association subject only to evidence that they have a satisfactory pattern of administration and that they have no ruling which would prohibit the membership of any particular category of young people. The Association provides a wide variety of services, the most important of which are concerned with leadership training and consultation from professional staff on any problems encountered by the club in its own development. These services operate through four separate divisions, one of which provides research or consultation services on a fee-charging basis to local government or other bodies concerned with overall planning, while the other three provide services to the affiliated clubs, these divisions being established according to the various types of club programme. This paper will only describe the preparation of volunteer workers in one such division, namely, the Keystone Clubs Division.     

The Implications of Sex Differences on Volunteer Preferences

This study explores the relationship between sex differences and preferences for volunteer roles, organizations, and supervision. A series of hypotheses were developed from prior research on sex differences from the fields of biology, neuroscience, and psychology to determine whether such preferences can be predicted. An online survey panel of over 700 individuals comprised the sample. Many of the hypotheses were supported. Implications of the findings on future research and on volunteer recruitment and retention are discussed.     

The Fourth Wave of Feminism: Psychoanalytic Perspectives

The discussion focuses on the ways in which the 3 panelists in their lives and work embody fourth wave feminism, which combines politics, psychology, and spirituality in an overarching vision of change. Jane Fonda's emphasis on the importance of making narratives of gender a central organizer for personal and societal transformation, Hedda Bolgar's insistence that psychoanalysts recognize the complex dialectic between unconscious dynamics and sociocultural realities in order not to conflate conflicts rooted in social inequalities with individual issues, and Sue Shapiro's understanding of the ambiguous role of individual therapy in situations of historical and social trauma such as the tsunami in Indonesia are all examples of fourth wave feminism in practice. The unfinished business of the first 3 waves of feminism—that is, the inequalities that persist in the political and personal spheres—are discussed with the idea that these unfinished agendas will contribute to the fourth wave, in which social action and spiritual/psychological practice converge.     

Volunteer Reliability in Nonprofit Organizations: A Theoretical Model

The reliability of volunteers is a major concern for many nonprofit organizations. To address this problem in more detail, we develop a theoretical model of volunteer reliability based on psychological contract theory. By taking this perspective as a starting point, we explore how individual volunteer characteristics, organizational factors, and sociological developments shape the exchange of inducements and contributions between volunteers and nonprofit organizations. We discuss how these factors can create tensions in the psychological contract and determine the extent to which volunteers behave reliably. As such, we develop a theoretical framework for addressing the reliability problem in volunteer management.     

The Good Grandparent: Perspectives of Young Adults

As life expectancy increases, the role of grandparent has increased in duration and is continually adapting as families change in structure, function and form. Across the past several decades, researchers have examined grandparenting styles, finding some consistency as well as the emergence of newer styles, and evidence that grandparenting styles are related to the age and gender of both the grandparents and the grandchildren. In this study, we investigated young adults’ perceptions of grandparenting quality. University Students (N?=?470) from a Midwestern university responded to an online survey that asked them to evaluate the quality of their grandparents grandparenting now and at two retrospective points in time, childhood and adolescence. We hypothesized that the grandparents' performance of multiple styles of their role would be related to grandparenting quality. In addition, we expected that preferred grandparental roles would vary in relation to grandchildren's gender. The results of regression analysis indicated that, although grandparenting quality tended to decline across the respondents' developmental stages, higher ratings at an earlier stage were related to higher ratings at the latter two stages. Further, grandsons preferred grandparents who performed as supporters and advisors, whereas granddaughters preferred grandparents who functioned as supporter and friend. Overall, grandmothers were likely to be the more significant grandparent. Continual research on both grandchildren and grandparents will be needed to chronicle the development of the grandparental role in changing times.     

The Boundaries of Difference: Negotiating Gender in Recreational Sport*

There is a pervasive belief that meaningful gender differences structure the abilities and desires of bodies. These gender differences are presented as categorical imperatives, despite the prevalence of a range of abilities and desires across genders. How are beliefs about gender differences maintained in light of increasing challenges? Adult recreational sports provide an interesting subworld in which to investigate this question. Through an ethnography of coed softball, reactions to women's demonstrations of excellence is examined to reveal a complicated situation in which belief systems surrounding ideologies of gender difference are often simultaneously challenged and reinvigorated. The work problematizes understandings of difference as perpetuating systems of inequality. The article closes with a discussion of challenges to conceptions of difference and offers a way to move beyond “boundaries of difference.”     

The Educator as Advocate: The Gerontologist in an Academic Setting

The educator in a school of social work functions not only as a teacher of students but also as an advocate. The educator-advocate as gerontologist must simultaneously develop a core training in aging, induce other faculty members to add gerontological content, build interdisciplinary bridges with other academic units, and influence other educational institutions. The role of advocate demands a flexible use of strategies and tactics as well as evaluations of process and products, identification of factors associated with success and failure, and formulation of policy recommendations.     

Looking Beyond Traditional Volunteer Management: A Case Study of an Alternative Approach to Volunteer Engagement in Parks and Recreation

In an era of declining volunteerism it is critical to examine alternative approaches to volunteer management that may better promote engagement and address common barriers to volunteering. Using a “best practices” Canadian case study approach, this research describes an alternative approach to volunteer engagement that emphasizes lifestyle integration, organizational informality and flexibility, and volunteer–agency collaboration. We suggest that traditional volunteer management structures may actually be hindering engagement and call instead for a more vocation-based, networked, and collaborative approach which affords greater autonomy to the volunteer and sees power being shared between agencies and volunteers.     

Role of Local Newspaper Media in Generating a Citizen Volunteer Consciousness

The present paper explores the role of the local media, in the form of a prefectural–level newspaper, in relation to local volunteer activity. The local newspaper's potential for generating social knowledge and uniting resident's consciousness about volunteerism and volunteer activity is examined, considering the influence of volunteer organization leaders on media and public volunteer–related agendas. The data presented appear to point to a role for the local newspaper in generating a positive volunteer consciousness, which is latent at present. The results suggest that while volunteer organization leadership is active in contacting the media, they appear to be less careful in establishing or policing the message they would have the media deliver. The present paper concludes by proposing that for Japanese volunteer organizations to better use the media in creating positive volunteer consciousness in their communities, they must work to establish their own media agenda and use both indirect means (through traditional media) and direct means (through direct public relations campaigns), to get that message to local residents.