Volunteers as Boundary Workers: Negotiating Tensions Between Volunteerism and Professionalism in Nonprofit Organizations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article employs a boundary work framework to analyze how volunteers from two nonprofit human services organizations navigated the tensions between volunteerism and professionalism. Based on interview data and analysis of organizational documents, the study found that volunteers at the first organization, fundraisers for child health promotion and parent education, dichotomized volunteerism and professionalism as incompatible social systems with divergent objectives, practices, and tools. Volunteers at the second organization, which provides emergency ambulance services, engaged in constant boundary crossing, oscillating between a volunteer and professional approach to tasks and relationships depending on the context. In both cases, paid staff and members of the public affected participants’ ability to engage in boundary work. The study offers insights for nonprofit organizations wishing to professionalize their volunteer workforce by specifying how volunteer job types, organizational structure, and interactional partners’ feedback impact volunteers’ ability to engage in boundary crossing, passing, and boundary spanning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".