Abstract
Volunteering in the UK is a significant activity. Regular formal volunteering, described as ‘giving unpaid help through a group, club or organisation at least once a month’, involves one in five adults in the UK, which equates to an estimated 9.2 million people (NCVO, 2022). Despite this, there is relatively little research within the field of HRM which focuses on the management of volunteers. Focusing on the management of volunteers, then, this paper revisits one of the most erudite questions of our discipline but one which has, more recently, fallen out of fashion. ‘What, why and with what effects, do managers do what they do?’. In asking this question, we attempt to illuminate a hitherto unresearched area of the management of volunteers in a bid to challenge the uncritical transplantation of traditional for-profit HRM policies and practices into the third sector.
Drawing on qualitative research in two UK heritage conservation organisations, we shine a light on what managers of volunteers do and how this may require a different skill set to those managers who are employed in the management of paid staff. In so doing, we conclude that whilst there are significant differences required of those managing volunteers there is much the for-profit sector might and should want to learn. Thus, we conclude that rather than the voluntary sector looking to the tropes established in for-profit HRM as a source of best practice, the reverse may be more informative.