The Emergence and Endurance of Civic Action in Fluid Forms of Organizing: A Practice-oriented Exploration of Flexible Forms of Volunteering in loose Organizational Attachments

Both civil society professionals and volunteering researchers have noticed a trend in volunteering towards more flexible formats in looser organizational attachments. These changes have arisen in a host of initiatives, ranging from responses to the COVID-19 crisis to everyday actions such as alternative exchange arrangements and recreational activities. Practitioners are particularly conflicted about how to deal with a certain kind of flexible format, which the thesis refers to as “fluid” forms of organizing. In fluid organizing, fuzzy group boundaries and lateral governance give participants a lot of autonomy to continuously define their tasks and roles. These characteristics differentiate the phenomenon from other flexible formats already covered in volunteering research. Seeking out novel insights on such organizing, I aim to contribute knowledge relevant to volunteering scholarship as well as to policy makers and practitioners.
As participants often deliberately choose fluid forms of organizing, they are a format one can expect to see in future problem-solving. But the fact that these forms differ from a strong Nordic tradition for citizen-organizing in associations raises a range of concerns among civil society professionals in Denmark. Two themes arise in these concerns: the degree to which these forms are collective or individual in nature and to which they are ephemeral. The former theme matters greatly to practitioners when they assess whether fluid forms of organizing constitute
“democratically anchored communities of commitment with purposes of public benefit,” which would make them eligible for public support. Research has also raised this theme of collectivity in questioning whether some flexible forms of volunteering are so individualized as to dilute the civic quality of modern engagement. Here, researchers interpret “civic” as involving collective, not individual, acts and a purpose of improving common life. In terms of the theme of ephemerality, practitioners and politicians find fluid forms of organizing hard to discern and ask for some means of better seeing and understanding the phenomenon. Concurrently, fluid forms of organizing are ascribed a transient nature – an understanding that scholarship foregrounds by describing flexible volunteering as episodic and short-term. This emphasis on the ephemeral leads to the pressing question of how fluid forms of organizing flexible volunteering can succeed in producing enduring civic action. Thus, the two themes spur three questions, which I engage with by asking:
How does civic action emerge and endure over time in fluid forms of organizing volunteering, and how can one understand these processes?