The Governance of Voluntary Work in the Public Sector: Institutional Differences and Invariant Traits

In response to fiscal constraint and the introduction of quasi-market mechanisms into the public sector, in public policy there appears to be the acceptance of the increased use of voluntary labour in the delivery of public services. Traditional forms of governance have tended to ignore the use of voluntary labour in the public sector. The paper builds on an earlier (Hellshorm and Collins, 1999) model of concurrence between voluntary and municipal labour, by focusing onthe demand side of voluntary work. Our exploratory study uses this model to analyse two municipal organisations' mix of voluntary and municipal labour, one Italian and the other a Swedish context.The research method used to collect empirical data was semi-structured interviews of local government employees within the two sites. Thisis linked with an analysis of the institutional context of the two municipalities to inform and test the proposed model of demand for volunteer labour in local government. Resource scarcity, presence of agency for voluntary work, type of production and state rules and norm are used to analyse the institutional invariant traits. The study concludes that traditional institutional theory has ignored voluntary activities. Our case studies of actual practice indicate that different state norms and ruleson citizen rights and equal opportunities are stronger influential factors than the resources situation, in determining the demand for voluntary activities in municipalities.