Reconstructing the professional domain: Boundary work of professionals and volunteers in the context of social service reform

Abstract

Spanish

French

Shifts from professionals to volunteers are observed across national contexts and in various types of public services, particularly in long-term care and social work. This article examines how professionals and volunteers in the Netherlands perform boundary work to construct, maintain and dissolve boundaries between them in the context of social service reform. Two types of boundary work were found: demarcation work and welcoming work. Demarcation work relates to a situation where differences in knowledge, authority and reliability between professionals and volunteers are emphasised. Welcoming work involves the efforts of professionals to welcome specific volunteers to their professional domain. This study examines the implications of the second type of boundary work for structural characteristics of the social service sector. It concludes that although welcoming work can lead to deprofessionalisation, it can also promote the professionalisation of nurses and social workers.

Keywords

Boundary work deprofessionalisation long-term care professionalisation professionals social work volunteers welfare state reform

Introduction

Confronted with rising expenditures, many welfare states are looking for ways to reorganise healthcare and social services in order to make them sustainable (Gilbert, 2002). Besides introducing market mechanisms that aim to make services more efficient (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992), policymakers are giving more responsibilities to citizens, who are expected to take care of themselves, their relatives and their neighbours (Muehlebach, 2012). In such an ‘active citizen regime’ (Tonkens, 2012), volunteers, i.e. people who provide services to help others in their spare time without receiving payment, usually in a formal or informal organisation (Hustinx et al., 2010; Stebbins, 2009), play an important role. Shifts from professionals to volunteers can be observed across national contexts and in various types of public services, particularly in the domains of long-term care and social work (Baines, 2004; Faulkner and Davies, 2005; Hardill and Baines, 2011). Volunteers are not only valued because they are, at least in theory, cheaper than paid professionals, but also because of their knowledge of service users’ needs and their assumed contribution to social cohesion (Liljegren et al., 2014; Muehlebach, 2012).

Earlier studies suggest that there are contradictory expectations of volunteers. On the one hand, they are expected to be similar to paid professionals, in the sense that they should have a ‘professional’ attitude and need training in order to be fit for their ‘job’ (Hardill and Baines, 2011: 4). On the other hand, they are valued for being different from professionals in that they provide ‘warm’ instead of ‘distant’ or ‘impersonal’ care (Eliasoph, 2011: 118). These potentially conflicting expectations may lead to uncertainty among professionals and volunteers about their mutual roles and boundaries. However, so far few studies have systematically investigated the consequences of the shift to volunteers in social services for professional–volunteer collaboration and demarcation. The aim of this article is to examine when, how and why professionals and volunteers erect, maintain or dissolve boundaries between them, and to investigate the implications of this boundary work for social service provision. Our study contributes to existing studies in three ways: (1) although the notion of boundary work was used before to understand interprofessional relationships, not much attention has been paid to how boundaries between professionals and ‘laymen’, such as volunteers, are constructed in work situations (Lamont and Molnár, 2002: 178); (2) existing studies on professional boundaries mainly focus on efforts of erecting and maintaining boundaries (Fournier, 2000), while we address situations in which boundaries are actively dissolved; (3) we acknowledge that boundary work of professionals and volunteers does not take place in a vacuum (Bijker et al., 2009: 146) and therefore we do not only focus on micro-level practices, but also zoom out (Nicolini, 2009) to see how these practices relate to structural aspects of the social service sector, including status and working conditions.

Before explaining our theoretical approach, we first review the literature on the role of volunteers in the social policies of various welfare states, with special attention to the Netherlands, where our multiple case study is located. In the methods section, we describe how we selected our long-term care and social work cases and how the fieldwork was conducted. In the results section, we discuss two types of boundary work, demarcation work and welcoming work, and explain how and when markers of difference are mobilised or downplayed. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of our findings for the study of boundary work and for debates on (de)professionalisation in the context of welfare state reforms.

The shift from professionals to volunteers

Various scholars have argued that the current attention to volunteering across welfare states is unprecedented (Dahlberg, 2006; Johansson et al., 2012). Although voluntary work is ‘far from new’, expectations about its contribution to the ‘wellbeing of individuals and communities have never been greater’ (Hardill and Baines, 2011: 21). A shift to volunteers in social services can be observed in most developed welfare states, for example, in Germany and Italy (Komp et al., 2013; Muehlebach, 2012), Scandinavian countries (Lorentzen and Henriksen, 2014; Overgaard, 2015), the UK (Hardill and Baines, 2011), the Netherlands (Verhoeven and Tonkens, 2013), Canada (Baines, 2004; Elson, 2009) and Australia (Johansson et al., 2012).

There are generally four main reasons for this shift to volunteers. First, governments hope that volunteers will fill the gaps that have resulted from austerity policies and an increased need for social services (Stebbins, 2009). Second, volunteering is promoted as ‘the public production of citizens as heartfelt subjects’ (Muehlebach, 2012: 11) and thus as a contribution to social cohesion and solidarity (Bredewold et al., 2016; Eliasoph, 2011). Third, volunteering is seen as a key to empowerment. By becoming volunteers, vulnerable people participate in society and hopefully rely less on government support (Verhoeven and Tonkens, 2013). Fourth, governments aim to manage and improve the cooperation between the state and the voluntary sector by creating collaborative partnerships aimed at encouraging volunteering (Gil-Lacruz and Marcuello, 2013).

This article focuses on the shift to volunteers in social service provision in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is an interesting – and arguably radical – case, since current welfare state reforms are in sharp contrast to the generous social services of earlier times (Grootegoed, 2013: 17). The main reform that contributed to increased responsibilities for volunteers was enacted in 2007, with the introduction of the Social Support Act (Wet maatschappelijke ondersteuning, Wmo – recently replaced by the amended Wmo 2015). Needy citizens are now supposed to turn to their own social network and to volunteers before requesting support from local government, and all citizens are expected to ‘participate’, if not in paid work then at least in volunteering (Kampen et al., 2013).

In this study, we are not concerned with volunteers per se, but with their collaboration with paid professionals in publicly funded social service organisations in the domains of long-term care and social work. In the Netherlands around 450,000 people do voluntary work in the care sector. Half of these are active in organisations that almost entirely depend on volunteers, whereas the other half do voluntary work within publicly funded organisations, such as nursing homes (Scholten, 2011). About 530,000 volunteers are active in the field of youth and social work, in schools, community centres and playgrounds (CBS, 2014). Approximately 65,000 paid jobs in long-term care and social work have disappeared in the past two years (CBS, 2015). No official figures are available about whether these paid professionals have been replaced by volunteers. However, given these job losses, paid professionals in social services in the Netherlands might increasingly see volunteers as a threat to their already precarious position, similar to what Baines (2004) found in Canada.

The general distinction we draw between (unpaid) volunteers and (paid) professionals needs some explanation. In classic professional domains such as medicine and law, the definition of the professional is rather clear cut (Freidson, 2001). However, in social services, the definition of the professional is hampered by the traditional notion that care is mostly provided by women within families. This notion lends support to the prejudice that women have the natural ability to provide such care (Tronto, 1993). Because of their perceived less specialised knowledge and their lower level of disciplinary control, professionals in nursing and social work are sometimes called ‘semi-professionals’ (Etzioni, 1969), a term which is often criticised because it reproduces binary gender stereotypes of non-professional ‘female’ emotion versus professional ‘male’ rationality (Heite, 2012: 6). In this article, we use the notion that a profession is the outcome of processes of ‘isolation and boundary construction’ instead of the outcome of ‘the intellectual division of labour’ (Fournier, 2000: 73, cf. Saks, 2015). Based on the efforts of the women’s movement, nursing and social work developed ‘from being voluntary through being a vocation to becoming a profession’ (Heite, 2012: 6), implying that this occupation is only accessible with specialised education (Andrews and Wærness, 2011: 44). Still, boundaries between professionals and volunteers in social services are highly fragile, also because some volunteers in this field used to be paid professionals themselves (Hoad, 2002). Given these fragile and contested boundaries, we adopt a boundary work perspective to systematically examine boundary (re- or de)construction between professionals and volunteers.

A boundary work perspective

The term boundary work was coined by Gieryn in 1983 to refer to the discursive practices of scientists to distinguish themselves from ‘non-scientists’ or ‘pseudoscientists’. The emphasis on work – instead of just talking about boundaries – originates from the symbolic interactionist tradition and highlights that ‘boundaries are not just merely “out there”’ (Halffman, 2003: 55), but are constantly (re)crafted. Boundary work is often understood as demarcation work and includes efforts of ‘erecting and maintaining boundaries’ (Fournier, 2000: 69), for instance, through monopolisation, expansion, exclusion and protection (Gieryn, 1995). However, boundary work is also about bridging and crossing boundaries (Bijker et al., 2009; Halffman, 2003).

Many studies in the literature on (health)care and social professions report demarcation work, but instances of boundary crossing have also been reported. Several studies suggest that government attempts to stimulate boundary crossing, for example, by establishing interdisciplinary teams, usually result in professionals (and their associations) adopting strategies of discrediting, problematising and ignoring competitor professions (Bucher et al., 2016; King et al., 2015). In their study on collaboration between nurses and healthcare assistants, Bach et al. (2012) mainly describe examples of demarcation, particularly enacted by nurses who were disappointed that healthcare assistants had taken over the patient-centred aspects of their occupation. Conversely, in an ethnographic study in a surgical intensive care unit, Conn et al. (2016) identified demarcation behaviour, which they coined ‘magnifying’ boundaries, but also found examples of ‘mitigating’ boundaries around expertise, patient ownership and decisional authority. Similarly, Apesoa-Varano (2013) found various forms of boundary crossing, such as performing non-medical tasks of others or making claims beyond one’s own field of expertise. These boundary crossings occurred in the name of patient wellbeing and were initiated by bedside professionals, such as physicians, nurses, therapists and social workers, in a hospital. However, they rarely led to role uncertainty, since biomedical knowledge and intervention were prioritised above caring tasks so that borders were crossed but not transformed (Apesoa-Varano, 2013).

Various authors who found a combination of demarcation and crossing or mitigating of boundaries point to the gendered character of healthcare and/or social work to explain their findings. Nurses and social workers have a weak professional status, based on the idea that this type of work demands natural ‘female’ talents for caring rather than specialised training, and boundary demarcation is explained as an attempt to prevent degradation. Simultaneously, it is argued that nurses and social workers find work content more important than professional status, which promotes boundary crossing (Apesoa-Varano, 2013; Bach et al., 2012). Taken together, this literature suggests that boundary crossing is more likely to occur in traditionally ‘female’ occupations and when professionals initiate it themselves, rather than when forced by policymakers. Moreover, boundary crossing can keep the roles of actors and the hierarchy between them intact.

We see a boundary work perspective as particularly useful in scrutinising the boundaries between professionals and volunteers in the context of social service reform. It could be expected that professionals and volunteers would be more likely to perform demarcation work than to cross or bridge their differences, if collaboration is initiated from the top down. It could also be expected that if they do cross the boundaries between them, this will not lead to deconstruction of these boundaries. However, given our focus on lower-status, traditionally female-dominated professions, the professionals studied in this research might be more prone than higher-status professionals to downplay differences between themselves and others. It is also possible that nurses and social workers, confronted with the even lower-status group of volunteers, will try to re-establish clear boundaries in order to protect their precarious status as professional from the risk of degradation.

Earlier studies on professional–volunteer relationships have seldom adopted a systematic boundary work approach and do not provide a clear answer to the question of whether, when, how and why professionals and volunteers in social services demarcate, cross or even dissolve the boundaries between them. An exception is Hoad (2002), who found that volunteers were allowed to take over certain ‘professional’ tasks, depending on their skills and confidence, without this causing problems between professionals and volunteers. Hoad also found demarcation practices among volunteers, who protested against performing similar care tasks as professionals without getting paid. Our boundary work approach scrutinises practices of bridging in a more systematic way and enables us to identify a specific form of boundary work – welcoming work – which has the potential to transform boundaries, rather than merely cross them.

Research locations and methods

This article is based on empirical data collected for the research project ‘Can’t We Leave That to the Volunteers?’ in cooperation with several governmental and societal partners, including municipalities, ministries, housing corporations and a long-term care organisation. In consultation with the project partners, four Dutch cases pertaining to the domains of long-term care and social work were selected, since the expansion of volunteer responsibilities is prominent there. The four cases are similar in that volunteers work together with professionals and are expected to assist them or to take over some of their tasks and responsibilities completely. They differ in the type of service that is provided and the degree to which professional and volunteer tasks are distinct or overlap.

Selected cases

Case 1: Nursing homes

The two selected nursing homes in Amsterdam offer small-scale living facilities for older people with severe Alzheimer’s disease. Due to cutbacks, the professional staff has been reduced over the years. Nurses, nurse assistants and interns combine personal care, household and administrative tasks. Activity coordinators are often assisted by a volunteer. In principle, volunteers (usually two or three per floor) do not help with personal care and administrative tasks. They take clients for walks and prepare meals. These nursing homes are part of a long-term care organisation which promotes further involvement of volunteers in tasks directed at the clients’ wellbeing.

Case 2: Day-care activity centres

We studied three day-care locations (in Zaanstad and Amsterdam), which offer day-care activities for people with intellectual disabilities. Two are directed at people with various kinds of disabilities, such as autism and Down syndrome; the third offers activities for people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Clients participate in activities such as handicrafts, gardening, gymnastics and playing games, and are usually assisted by one or two professionals and up to five volunteers. These day-care centres have recently assigned more tasks to volunteers.

Case 3: Community centres

We studied seven community centres located in a relatively poor and ethnically diverse district of Amsterdam. Before 2012, professionals offered activities for people from the neighbourhood. Nowadays, citizens are expected to organise activities themselves (such as dancing classes, painting, yoga, but also more educational activities, such as language courses and homework assistance). Volunteers are responsible for the canteen and often help professionals at the service desk. The role of professionals has changed; instead of organising activities themselves, they support volunteers in becoming more independent in their role.

Case 4: Children’s playgrounds

We studied four playgrounds for children in Utrecht. Three of them are located in neighbourhoods where most inhabitants have a low socioeconomic status and many people have an immigrant background. Traditionally, volunteers helped to organise occasional activities (such as a neighbourhood barbecue), and took care of the animals in the petting zoo. After a reorganisation, professionals spend less time in the playground and are expected to delegate more responsibilities to volunteers. While professionals currently still help with supervision and administrative tasks, they coach volunteers to become more self-reliant.

Data collection and analysis

Fieldwork took place between April and October 2013 and involved in-depth interviews with professionals and volunteers and observations of their daily practices. The project partners provided access to the various research locations and after initial meetings with middle-managers, we were allowed to observe the practices of professionals and volunteers within their organisation, and to approach them for interviews. From there, we used snowball sampling to recruit respondents for interviews.

We recruited volunteers and professionals with different characteristics to capture a wide range of opinions and attitudes. Our category of professionals included skilled paid workers such as nurses, nurse assistants, social workers and activity coordinators. They had a formal employment contract and had the required credentials to perform their functions. Our volunteers provided their services without getting paid and were not required to have a specific education or vocational background. Sometimes they were required to follow a short orientation or training programme. Most respondents were native Dutch women, but native Dutch men and men and women from minority groups were also represented. The age of our volunteers ranged from early twenties to late sixties, while most professionals were in their thirties or forties. Most volunteers had low education levels and no background in social service provision. Some had previously worked in care or social work or hoped to acquire a paid job in the near future. The interviews generally lasted between one and two hours, were recorded and transcribed verbatim, and included questions about the background of the respondents, their tasks, responsibilities, their experiences with their own role, and their collaboration with others.

Boundary work is not only a discursive practice, but can also appear in objects and in subtle or overt practices (Halffman, 2003; Oldenhof, 2015). In addition to the interviews, we therefore observed volunteers and professionals who worked together and volunteers who worked independently with clients or visitors. For example, during our observations, we paid attention to (restrictions in) the use of the physical environment and to differences and similarities in clothing. In total, we interviewed 69 professionals and 75 volunteers and observed activities 109 times (see the Appendix for a specification per case).

Data were analysed using a preliminary conceptual framework, combining deductive and inductive reasoning. A focus on the division of tasks and responsibilities and a broad notion of boundaries guided the coding in Atlas.ti. Although the analysis showed that the cases and locations have their own specifics, the similarities among them were striking. We therefore organise our findings based on relevant themes, instead of on the separate cases. However, we do address important differences between the long-term care cases and the social work cases.

Demarcation work: Mobilising markers of difference to exclude volunteers

Similar to studies which showed that interprofessional collaboration often involves practices of erecting and maintaining boundaries, we found that professionals and volunteers demarcate differences between them in various ways. We refer to this type of boundary work as demarcation work. Three markers of difference (Lamont and Molnár, 2002: 180) or boundary markers were used to emphasise differences between the two groups: (1) knowledge and skills; (2) status and authority; and (3) predictability and reliability. Both professionals and volunteers refer to the importance of these differences. However, particularly professionals mobilise them to exclude volunteers from their ‘professional’ territory because they perceive them as relatively unskilled, unauthoritative and unreliable.

Demarcation based on differences in knowledge and skills

Many respondents mentioned that volunteers have less specialised knowledge and skills than professionals. This is generally seen as the most important reason for differences between their tasks and responsibilities, particularly in the nursing homes we studied. Volunteers are not allowed to provide personal care, such as washing clients or guiding them to the toilet, or to provide medical care, such as giving them their medicine. Based on educational differences, long-term care professionals often draw a line between nursing tasks performed by professionals and wellbeing tasks performed by volunteers:

We [the professionals] all received education for that. And we’re hired for care activities. A volunteer is here … to give clients some extra attention. (P1, day-care centre A)

Most volunteers agreed with this division of tasks. A volunteer told us that she did not take clients to the toilet or give them medication, because she was not educated to do so:

That’s not my task. I won’t do such things. I’ll get a glass of water, but I won’t put the pills in their mouths. You should avoid doing things you know nothing about. (V1, nursing home A)

Volunteers sometimes crossed these boundaries, but this did not result in eliminating differences between professionals and volunteers. One volunteer (V2, nursing home B), for instance, disclosed that she once helped a client out of bed, because there was no professional around and the client had been waiting for a long time. The volunteer called this ‘her little secret’ and asked the interviewer not to tell the professionals or managers because she could get into trouble. She expected that the professionals would not welcome her to their territory and therefore decided to remain silent instead of challenging the boundaries.

Professionals who were critical of the shift to volunteers in their organisation emphasised the differences in knowledge and skills. Particularly professionals in day-care centres argued that recreational activities with clients should still be part of their professional domain, because interacting with clients also requires specific skills. These professionals feel that volunteers have taken over parts of their territory and wish to re-conquer ‘the spaces … claimed by others’ (Gieryn, 1995: 429).

Demarcation based on differences in status and authority

Many respondents mentioned status and authority as another important boundary marker, particularly in community centres and playgrounds, where the difference between professional and volunteer knowledge and skills is more blurred than in long-term care. Volunteers in these public facilities carry out many tasks that are also performed by professionals, such as working at the information desks in community centres or supervising children in playgrounds. Despite this overlap, both professionals and volunteers stated that volunteers were less equipped to exercise authority, because they did not have the same status as professionals.

In the management of public facilities, tensions between visitors are a recurring phenomenon. During our observations in playgrounds, we often saw children argue with each other. In community centres, adult visitors quarrelled about cleaning up after an activity or about using other people’s equipment. At all the sites we studied, volunteers usually appeared reluctant to correct the behaviour of visitors or to give instructions. Some volunteers had tried to intervene but had stopped because visitors did not listen to them. Both professionals and volunteers stated that reprimanding was easier for professionals, who have a formal status in the organisation and who are seen as independent ‘judges’ in conflict situations. A professional explained:

We’re the playground supervisors and when we say that something needs to be done, they do it right away. But when a volunteer tells someone to do something, they say: ‘Hey, you’re not my boss, you’re just a mother like me, or a grandmother, or a neighbour; we’re equal, so you can’t boss me around.’ Even if that volunteer had organised everything, they just wouldn’t accept being told what to do by her. (P2, playground A)

According to another professional (P3, playground A), only paid professionals have the knowledge, skills and the authority to resolve problems such as ‘fights between adults and difficulties with youngsters who have hit puberty’.

Our findings show that boundaries are not only marked by language but also by objects (cf. Halffman, 2003; Oldenhof, 2015), such as clothing. In many of the playgrounds, professionals wear uniforms while most volunteers wear regular clothes. According to several professionals and volunteers, this difference in clothing can partly explain perception differences in authority. A volunteer (V3, playground B) said: ‘I’m wearing an ordinary T-shirt, so, they [children and their parents] don’t have to listen to me.’ Visitors tend to feel that volunteers have a lower status and less authority than professionals. The fact that volunteers do not wear a uniform and thus look more like ordinary visitors than like professionals emphasises this difference.

Demarcation based on differences in predictability and reliability

Many respondents mentioned predictability and reliability as another important boundary marker that professionals and volunteers mobilise to emphasise their differences. We found this in all four cases. Professionals see the ‘no strings attached’ attitude of many volunteers as a disadvantage, whereas many volunteers see it as one of the merits of doing voluntary (instead of paid) work.

Professionals argued that they cannot count on volunteers. A professional (P4, nursing home B) said that her organisation would be too ‘vulnerable’ if she depended on volunteers. Volunteers promised to come, but failed to show up. A professional working at a community centre stated that volunteers did not take their tasks as seriously as paid workers did since they were not obliged to work:

You can’t really trust them. Those people don’t get any money for the work they do; they do it voluntarily. So I always have to check their work. (P5, community centre A)

In nursing homes, trustworthiness and reliability are important values. Can volunteers be trusted with clients’ personal belongings and valuables? To prevent any suspicion from professionals and from clients’ relatives, volunteers are not allowed to go into the clients’ bedrooms unaccompanied. Professionals and relatives have an electronic key to enter the shared living room, but volunteers have to wait for a professional to open the door for them. A professional (P6, nursing home B) explained that, ‘of course, this is inconvenient for volunteers’, but, due to their lack of formal contract or family relation, ‘they have no business inside’.

Many volunteers also referred to this boundary marker, but valued and phrased it differently. They argued that one of the attractive features of voluntary work is that it does not involve formal obligations. They feel entitled to be less predictable and reliable in terms of showing up. It should be noted that across the cases, many volunteers come on fixed days and feel obliged to be present because they know others rely on them. However, volunteers often underlined that they are under no formal obligation to come. One volunteer explained:

Last year, they asked me whether I could do some voluntary work one or two fixed days a week. But if there’s a schedule, shouldn’t they pay me something? Now, I can decide whether or not to come, but with a schedule, I have to come. (V4, community centre A)

This limited commitment is not only related to the number of hours that volunteers work, but also to their tasks. One of the respondents (V5, nursing home B) explained: ‘I’m a volunteer, so if I don’t want to do something, they understand.’ Volunteers often emphasise their volunteer identity – being unpaid and performing activities in their leisure time – when they have the feeling that they are being ‘used’ by the organisation as a cheap substitute for professionals (cf. Hoad, 2002).

When they give you a lot of responsibilities and a lot of tasks, you start to think: ‘Hey, why don’t they pay me for this?’ (V6, nursing home A)

Various long-term volunteers, who were present before the recent policy changes, stopped volunteering or decided to come only on an ad hoc basis, because they disagreed with an extended (unpaid) role.

We can conclude that both professionals and volunteers agree that important differences between them legitimise clear demarcations between their tasks and responsibilities. Boundaries are not only erected and maintained through language but also through clothing and spatial privileges. However, besides these more or less expected practices of demarcation work, we also found instances of a different phenomenon we coin welcoming work.

Welcoming work: Inviting specific volunteers into the professional domain

During the interviews and observations, we came across several instances of professionals who invited volunteers into their ‘professional’ domain. Differences between professionals and volunteers were actively downplayed, and volunteers were welcomed to participate in what would traditionally be seen as professional tasks and responsibilities. Since this involves an effort to welcome volunteers rather than passively tolerating volunteers on professional territory, we use the term welcoming work to describe these practices. There are three main differences between welcoming work and demarcation work. Welcoming work involves the (partial) deconstruction of boundaries, whereas demarcation work is about constructing and maintaining boundaries. Welcoming work is only performed by professionals, whereas demarcation work involves both professionals and volunteers. And welcoming work is directed at specific volunteers, whose qualities and competencies are acknowledged by professionals, whereas demarcation work is performed by professionals based on assumptions about volunteers in general.

Below, we focus on the questions of when, how and why welcoming work takes place, considering the arguments that professionals use when downplaying various boundary markers. Subsequently, we discuss structural aspects of the social service sector that seem to promote welcoming work.

Welcoming based on similarities or differences in knowledge and skills

Earlier, we contended that the boundaries between professional and volunteer tasks and responsibilities in nursing homes are generally clear. However, sometimes professionals welcome certain volunteers to perform similar tasks because they acknowledge the specific skills or competencies of the volunteer. In the following field note, the professional recognises that the volunteer is skilled enough (or perhaps even more skilled than herself) at a nursing task:

A professional tries to put in the dentures of a 90+ female client, who is lying in a bed-like wheelchair. The client keeps her jaws firmly closed. After having tried to put them in several times, the professional asks Rita, a long-time volunteer, if she could try to do it. Surprisingly fast, Rita manages to make the client relax her tense jaws and puts in the dentures. A few days later, the researcher confronts another professional at the same nursing home with what she saw and asks her whether volunteers sometimes take over some of the physical care tasks despite the clear rules. The professional answers that it is not part of the tasks of volunteers, but in the case of Rita, who is an experienced volunteer, it’s up to her if she’s willing to do so or not. (Field note, nursing home B)

Some respondents said they do not want to use the terms ‘professionals’ and ‘volunteers’, since many volunteers are also ‘professional’ in their knowledge and skills (cf. Hoad, 2002). Particular volunteers were also welcomed based on additional (rather than identical) knowledge and skills. In day-care centres, where professionals and volunteers assist clients with intellectual disabilities with handicrafts and gardening, volunteers with special skills are welcomed to take over some of the professionals’ tasks. A professional explained:

John is very technical, he knows how to make things from wood. He explains it to the clients and gives them extra information. I like volunteers who do that. We used to have a volunteer here who was a real carpenter. He was great! (P7, day-care centre B)

The professional added that such technical skills and knowledge are important in working with these clients. She had not been ‘trained to develop these in her education’. In this case, the differences between professional and volunteer knowledge and skills are emphasised, but in contrast to demarcation work, professionals use them as an argument to welcome volunteers to their own professional territory, instead of excluding them.

Welcoming based on similarities or differences in status and authority

Earlier we discussed that professionals and volunteers are often physically distinguishable because of differences in clothing, which reconfirms the conviction that volunteers have less authority than professionals. However, in one of the playgrounds, this difference was actively downplayed. The professionals and the long-term volunteers jointly decided it would be better if professionals and volunteers wore the same uniform when the playground was very crowded during the summer, so that children and parents could more easily identify the ‘playground staff’. This made the status difference between visitors and volunteers more prominent, while emphasising similarities between professionals and volunteers. Instead of regretting a lack of status difference, a professional of a community centre said: ‘Some people [visitors] think that we’re all volunteers, and I kind of like that’ (P8, community centre B).

In some cases, professionals even argued that certain volunteers had more authority than they did, due to their distinctive characteristics. In several long-term care settings, professionals mentioned that it was an advantage to have male volunteers, since there were also many male clients but (almost) no male professionals. A professional explains:

They [male clients] accept it more easily when a man asks them something, because they are among men and they think about us, women, ‘what do you know about it?’ It is not that they refuse to receive care from us, but with a man, it is just different. (P9, nursing home B)

We found that specific volunteers are welcomed in the professional domain either because they have similar sources of authority as professionals, or possess certain sources that professionals claim not to have.

Welcoming based on similarities in predictability and reliability

When a volunteer has proven to be as reliable as professionals, (s)he can join in certain ‘privileges’. In one of the nursing homes, volunteer Said, who has been around for a year, is allowed to enter clients’ bedrooms. A professional told us that she sometimes asks Said to fetch a client’s coat, because ‘he has been around for some time’ and she knows ‘who he is’ (P6, nursing home B). Across cases, volunteers who ‘stick to appointments’ and who are ‘trustworthy’ in the eyes of the professionals, are allowed to work more independently. In one of the playgrounds, for instance, the professional is not present all the time, because some volunteers have proven to be trustworthy and she is confident that they can work on their own.

Structural explanations for welcoming work

How can we explain that professionals in social services generally protect the boundaries of their ‘professional’ territory, but invite specific volunteers to enter their domain? On the one hand, professionals want to maintain the status and privileges that are connected to their profession, and erect fences to exclude outsiders who pose a potential threat (cf. Fournier, 2000; King et al., 2015). By generally keeping out volunteers based on their supposed lack of essential qualities, professionals emphasise that they cannot be replaced by volunteers. On the other hand, many professionals adopt a different approach towards specific volunteers, and value their skills and competencies. We propose that two structural characteristics of the social service sector can explain the occurrence of welcoming work: increased work pressure due to budget cuts and the fragility of the status of the professional in social services.

The fact that professionals welcome certain volunteers to take over some of their ‘professional’ tasks seems to be related to work pressure and tight schedules. During our observations in nursing homes, professionals were often in a hurry because they had to combine various care, administrative and coordinating tasks in too little time. Professionals mentioned that they were expected to do the same work in fewer hours than before the introduction of austerity measures. For example, one of them said ‘the government is only interested in cost cutting and doesn’t care about the quality of care, so we [professionals] have to rush around to get everything done’ (P10, nursing home B). Given their tight schedules, professionals see the extended tasks of volunteers as a support rather than a threat. It allows them to focus on providing quality service and on enhancing client wellbeing. This is more important for them than protecting their professional status (cf. Apesoa-Varano, 2013; Overgaard, 2015). Valuable time can be saved when a volunteer helps out with a resistant client or fetches a coat. Professionals say that they ‘wouldn’t be able to manage’ without volunteers (P11, day-care centre C), and that they can focus on ‘difficult’ clients (P12, nursing home A), have more time during their medication round and generally feel less pressured due to the presence of volunteers (P13, nursing home A). Nevertheless, professionals act as ‘gatekeepers’ (Halffman, 2003: 61) and decide which volunteers are allowed to cross their boundaries and which tasks they are allowed to do. In doing so, professional authority is reaffirmed rather than threatened. Welcoming work thus seems to be promoted in situations where professionals welcome relief, while still being in charge.

Another reason why professionals welcome certain volunteers is related to the fragility of their status. Their status as professionals has often been questioned, also due to its historical association with women’s unpaid labour (Heite, 2012). Moreover, many professionals have recently seen jobs disappear and colleagues made redundant and have expressed doubts about their own job security. Although several professionals say that they are ‘really scared’ (P14, nursing home A) or ‘always keep in mind’ (P15, community centre C) that volunteers will eventually replace paid staff (cf. Baines, 2004), this fear about the future does not necessarily lead to present-day demarcation work. We found examples of professionals who thought that working with volunteers was an opportunity to strengthen their own position. In the management of public facilities, we detected that supporting volunteers to become more self-reliant and to take over (formerly) core professional tasks contributes to the complexity of social workers’ roles and is therefore perceived as an upgrade of their position. For example, a professional said that he now devoted much time ‘activating and getting people involved’, and that this was very different compared to the more practical (activity organising) tasks he had done before (P16, community centre C). In playgrounds, where many paid workers with lower educational levels have lost their jobs in recent years, those who have survived the cutbacks acknowledge that volunteers have taken over certain tasks and responsibilities, but also point to the further professionalisation of their own jobs. One professional explicitly stated that a higher level of education was needed for the coordinating and delegating role that she had now. She explains why:

You have to network and think quickly! And they really expect more from you. You need to think more strategically. How am I going to pull this off? You need to think about how you’re going to accomplish things. In the past, I organised activities. Now, I still do that, but I have a more coordinating role. (P16, playground B)

Professionals distinguish themselves from volunteers by accentuating the coordination and communicative skills that their new role requires. This example shows that welcoming work does not imply the complete demolition of boundaries, but rather the selective permeability and transformation of boundaries.

Discussion

This qualitative multiple case study sheds light on how professionals and volunteers in social services erect, maintain and dissolve boundaries between them in the context of government policies that stimulate volunteer responsibilisation. We adopted a boundary work perspective to analyse how professionals and volunteers deal with their potentially blurred boundaries. Our findings show that professionals generally perform demarcation work. They emphasise differences between themselves and volunteers, mobilising three boundary markers – knowledge and skills, status and authority, and reliability and predictability. However, professionals use these same boundary markers to invite volunteers with specific skills and competencies into their professional domain. We suggest that the precarious status and work pressure of nurses and social workers can explain the occurrence of such welcoming work. In long-term care, the influx of volunteers allows nurses to concentrate on aspects of their work that are vital for maintaining high-quality services. In social work, working with volunteers offers an opportunity for social workers to redefine (and even upgrade) their professional position: from organising activities to coordinating volunteers.

While this research was conducted in the Netherlands, our findings have theoretical implications beyond the Dutch case. First of all, our findings contribute to a more context-sensitive conceptualisation of boundary work. In the sociology of professions, boundary work is dominantly used as a synonym for demarcation work. Professionals try to keep out ‘the Other’ – be it other professions, clients, or market influences (Fournier, 2000) – in order to protect their professional territory. When boundaries are crossed or mitigated, this generally does not imply boundary transformation (Apesoa-Varano, 2013; Conn et al., 2016). However, as Andrews and Wærness argued, instead of assuming that central concepts used in the sociology of professions are generally applicable, there is a need for ‘context-sensitive’ concepts ‘which allow more space for variety to be captured and registered’ (2011: 54). They found that practices of closure and protection that are common in male-dominated settings or patriarchal structures were not found in ‘occupations dominated by women in symmetrical relationships’ (2011: 54).

Building on this argument, we suggest that the general concept of boundary work needs to be elaborated, including what we coined welcoming work: a specific form of boundary work that involves efforts of professionals to invite volunteers to take part in and/or take over the activities that traditionally belong to the professional field. Instead of seeing volunteers as competitors who should be ignored or discredited, professionals actively downplay differences between themselves and ‘the Other’ in their welcoming work. Welcoming work is not the same as crossing or mitigating boundaries, but goes one step further, as the roles of different actors are actually transformed. Due to the increased tasks and responsibilities of volunteers, the roles of professionals have also changed, and have become more specialist or coordinative. However, welcoming work does not completely erase the (traditionally subtle) differences in power and status between professionals and volunteers, since professionals decide which volunteers are allowed to enter ‘their’ domain.

Although it remains an empirical question whether welcoming work is also present in other domains, we argue that it is likely to occur in lower-status (female-dominated) professions, which – compared to higher-status professions such as physicians – have limited exclusive knowledge and embrace an ideology of client-centeredness. These professions might therefore be more prone to open up to ‘outsiders’ who have proven to possess valuable skills. However, within the context of such lower-status professions, it depends on specific circumstances whether welcoming work occurs. As earlier research (Bach et al., 2012) showed and our findings confirmed, lower-status professionals also engage in demarcation work. Our research adds to earlier studies by suggesting that individual characteristics of the ‘outsiders’ are decisive in the decision of professionals to either exclude them from or invite them into their domain, and that welcoming work is promoted by structural characteristics, in particular, working conditions and opportunities for further professionalisation.

Our second theoretical point is related to processes of reprofessionalisation and deprofessionalisation in contemporary welfare states with their ‘shift to volunteers’. According to Andrews and Wærness (2011: 44), deprofessionalisation occurs ‘when a certain occupation’s jurisdiction or area of responsibility is reduced, and when occupational duties become less specialized’. Their study of Norwegian public health nurses describes how they have lost many of their responsibilities to other occupational groups. Instead of protecting themselves against these competitors, these nurses welcomed them as collaborative partners who could help them in providing ‘the best possible service for users’ (2011: 54). Whereas this shows that welcoming others can result in deprofessionalisation, we also found examples of further professionalisation. In our study, the role of the professional is indeed reduced, as volunteers take over certain responsibilities, such as going for a walk with clients or organising activities for children. However, since these are arguably ‘simpler’ tasks, professionals are now more focused on specialised tasks such as giving clients medicine or coaching volunteers. This can be seen as a sign of professionalisation. As long as professionals can decide which volunteers are allowed to take over which tasks, responsibilisation of volunteers is more likely to upgrade rather than downgrade the status of social service professionals. Altogether, we found two types of differentiation: between volunteers in general and volunteers with specific qualities, and between professionalising and deprofessionalising nurses and social workers. Parallel to Bach et al. (2012), who found that nurses were highly ambivalent about healthcare assistants taking over some of their tasks, the shift to volunteers has highly ambivalent outcomes for professionals. On the one hand, professionals contribute to their own deprofessionalisation by welcoming volunteers to their domain. On the other hand, (particularly higher-educated) professionals benefit from the influx of volunteers, both in maintaining high-quality services and in securing their own professional position.

Footnotes

Appendix

Number of interviews and observations.

Case	Interviews professionals	Interviews volunteers	Observations
Nursing homes	16	11	18
Day-care activity centres	23	18	21
Community centres	18	35	46
Playgrounds	12	11	24
Total	69	75	109

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the journal editor for their constructive comments and suggestions. In addition, we thank the members of the research groups Healthcare Governance and CIMIC (both at the Erasmus University Rotterdam) and the participants of the session ‘Changing Welfare Regimes and Changing Professional Work’ at the 12th ESA Conference for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Funding

This study was supported by grants from the knowledge institute for cities Platform31, the University of Amsterdam, the Active Citizenship Foundation (Stichting Actief Burgerschap), the municipalities of Amsterdam, The Hague, Utrecht and Zaanstad, the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, housing corporations Eigen Haard and Ymere, and care organisation Cordaan. Together, these partners formed the ‘Can’t We Leave That to the Volunteers?’ Research Consortium.

Author biographies

Marianne van Bochove is Assistant Professor of Healthcare Governance at the Institute of Health Policy and Management at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She holds a PhD in Sociology. From 2012 to 2014, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam and worked on the project ‘Can’t We Leave That to the Volunteers?’, which focused on changing relationships between professionals and volunteers in the Dutch social service sector. Her research and teaching interests and experience include healthcare policy reform, (de)professionalisation, migrant care work, transnational migration and urban citizenship. Across these fields, she is particularly interested in how boundaries between different groups are constructed and how identities are formed and changed.

Evelien Tonkens is Full Professor of Citizenship and Humanisation of the Public Sector at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands. From 2005 to 2014, she was Professor of Active Citizenship at the University of Amsterdam and from 2002 to 2005, she was a member of parliament for the GreenLeft Party. She holds a PhD in Social Sciences from Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on changing ideals and practices of citizenship against the background of welfare state reform, meritocratisation and globalisation. Her recent, co-authored books include: Summoning the Active Citizen: Responsibility, Participation and Choice (Amsterdam University Press, 2011, with Janet Newman), Crafting Citizenship: Understanding Tensions in Multi-Ethnic Societies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, with Menno Hurenkamp and Jan Willem Duyvendak) and The Culturalization of Citizenship: Belonging and Polarization in a Globalising World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, with Jan Willem Duyvendak and Peter Geschiere).

Loes Verplanke is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology of the University of Amsterdam. She holds a PhD in Social Economic History. From 2012 to 2014, she was a member of the research team ‘Can’t We Leave That to the Volunteers?’, which focused on changing relationships between professionals and volunteers in the Dutch social service sector. Her main research interests include changing ideals and practices of citizenship against the background of welfare state reform and (de)professionalisation of social work.

Suzanne Roggeveen is a PhD researcher in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Amsterdam. From 2012 to 2014, she was a junior researcher in the project ‘Can’t We Leave That to the Volunteers?’, in which she studied the relationships between professionals and volunteers in healthcare and public spaces in the Netherlands. Her main research interests are citizenship, interreligious relations, volunteering, migration, and current developments within Islam and Judaism. She currently studies the relations between Jews and Muslims in Amsterdam within the project ‘Delicate Relations: Jews and Muslims in Amsterdam and London’.

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