bologna — realising old or new ideals of quality?
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VOLUNTAS: International Journalof Voluntary and NonprofitOrganizationsOfficial journal of the InternationalSociety for Third-Sector Research ISSN 0957-8765 VoluntasDOI 10.1007/s11266-015-9577-z
When Doing Good Becomes a State Affair:Voluntary Service in Germany
Rabea Haß & Kathia Serrano-Velarde
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ORI GIN AL PA PER
When Doing Good Becomes a State Affair: VoluntaryService in Germany
Rabea Haß1• Kathia Serrano-Velarde2
� International Society for Third-Sector Research and The Johns Hopkins University 2015
Abstract In times of economic crisis, volunteer work comes to be seen as a
resource, both an economic one that provides social services as the state cuts back
on welfare spending; and a social one, to counteract the social disintegration that
accompanies disenchantment with politics. As a result, governments across Europe
have begun targeting the volunteer workforce through policy instruments. Our paper
examines the effects of government policy on volunteering traditions by analyzing
the implementation of a national voluntary service in Germany. Drawing on neo-
institutional theory, we argue that Germany’s state initiative has sparked competi-
tion between the new government voluntary service and preexisting programs or-
ganized by civil society organizations. We will show that this conflict has not
merely restructured relationships among program leaders, host institutions, educa-
tional facilities, and volunteers, but in fact called into question the very nature of
volunteering as a civic practice.
Resume En temps de crise economique, le travail benevole tend a etre percu
comme une ressource, a la fois economique, qui fournit des services sociaux au
moment ou l’Etat reduit les depenses de protection sociale, et sociale pour lutter
contre la desintegration sociale qui accompagne le desenchantement politique.
Ainsi, a travers l’Europe, les gouvernements ont commence a cibler le marche du
Rabea Haß and Kathia Serrano-Velarde contributed in equal measures to this paper.
& Rabea Haß
Kathia Serrano-Velarde
1 Hertie School of Governance, Friedrichstraße 180, 10117 Berlin, Germany
2 Center for Social Investment, Max Weber Institute for Sociology, Heidelberg University,
Bergheimer Str. 58, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany
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DOI 10.1007/s11266-015-9577-z
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travail benevole au moyen d’actions politiques. Notre etude examine les effets de la
politique gouvernementale sur les traditions en matiere de benevolat en analysant la
mise en œuvre d’un service volontaire national en Allemagne. Nous appuyant sur la
theorie neoinstitutionnelle, nous soutenons que l’initiative prise par l’Allemagne a
suscite de la concurrence entre le nouveau service volontaire du gouvernement et les
programmes preexistants organises par les organisations de la societe civile. Nous
montrerons que ce conflit a restructure non seulement les relations entre les re-
sponsables des programmes, les etablissements d’accueil, les etablissements d’en-
seignement et les benevoles, mais qu’en realite il a remis en question la nature
meme du benevolat en tant que pratique civique.
Zusammenfassung In Zeiten einer Wirtschaftskrise wird die ehrenamtliche Arbeit
als eine Ressource betrachtet, und zwar sowohl als eine wirtschaftliche Ressource, die
Sozialdienstleistungen bereitstellt, wenn der Staat Sozialausgaben kurzt, als auch als
eine soziale Ressource, um der gesellschaftlichen Desintegration entgegenzuwirken,
die durch eine Enttauschung mit der Politik entsteht. Deshalb haben Regierungen in
ganz Europa damit begonnen, politische Instrumente auf ehrenamtliche Arbeitskrafte
anzuwenden. Unser Beitrag untersucht die Auswirkungen der Regierungspolitik auf
die Traditionen ehrenamtlicher Arbeit, indem die Implementierung eines staatlichen
ehrenamtlichen Dienstes in Deutschland analysiert wird. Wir stutzen uns dazu auf die
neo-institutionelle Theorie und behaupten, dass die staatliche Initiative Deutschlands
einen Wettbewerb zwischen dem neuen Bundesfreiwilligendienst der Regierung und
den zuvor bestehenden Programmen der gemeinnutzigen Organisationen entfacht
hat. Wir legen dar, dass dieser Konflikt nicht nur die Beziehungen zwischen Pro-
grammleitern, Gastinstitutionen, Bildungseinrichtungen und Ehrenamtlichen um-
strukturiert hat, sondern in der Tat den wesentlichen Charakter ehrenamtlicher Arbeit
als eine burgerliche Praxis in Frage stellt.
Resumen En tiempos de crisis economica, el trabajo voluntario llega a verse
como un recurso, tanto uno economico que proporciona servicios sociales a medida
que el estado recorta el gasto en bienestar; como uno social, para contrarrestar la
desintegracion social que acompana el desencanto con la polıtica. Como resultado,
los gobiernos de toda Europa han empezado a dirigirse a la fuerza de trabajo
voluntaria mediante instrumentos polıticos. Nuestro documento examina los efectos
de la polıtica del gobierno sobre las tradiciones de voluntariado analizando la im-
plementacion de un servicio voluntario nacional en Alemania. Basandonos en la
teorıa neoinstitucional, argumentamos que la iniciativa estatal de Alemania ha
desencadenado la competencia entre el nuevo servicio voluntario del gobierno y los
programas preexistentes organizados por las organizaciones de la sociedad civil.
Mostraremos que este conflicto no ha reestructurado meramente las relaciones entre
los lıderes de los programas, las instituciones anfitrionas, los establecimientos ed-
ucativos, y los voluntarios, sino que de hecho ha puesto en entredicho la verdadera
naturaleza del voluntariado como una practica cıvica.
Keywords Voluntary services � Germany � Neo-institutional theory � Civic
education � Government-nonprofit relations
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Introduction
Over the past decade, volunteering has become a major issue in European social
welfare politics. Two main arguments are usually deployed in favor of volunteering:
first, volunteering develops forms of civic engagement and solidarity that are vital to
the integration of modern societies. Second, its positive externalities have an impact
on public services such as health care and social welfare. Motivated by these
arguments, governmental institutions have begun to view volunteering as a powerful
tool to foster economic sustainability and maintain social welfare. Over the past few
years, many European countries have instated national voluntary service programs
to promote volunteering, and an EU-wide program (the European Voluntary Corps)
was recently launched. National voluntary services generally take the form of state-
run programs that recruit, place, and monitor volunteers of different sexes and ages.
The largest and most prominent of these services is undoubtedly the German
‘‘Bundesfreiwilligendienst’’ (henceforth BFD), which was founded in 2011 and has
been used as a blueprint for reform in other countries. Since its implementation, it
has placed over 100,000 volunteers, who usually spend 1 year in a host institution,
receive a small living allowance, and attend educational programs. Although this
type of voluntary service has a long tradition in Germany, this is the first one to be
run by a government agency (Jakob 2011). The BFD thus coexists—and
competes—with civil society programs that have been placing and training
volunteers for over 50 years. Moreover, the BFD was built on two traditions: on one
hand, it relies on the framework put in place by the civil society programs with
which it is now collaborating and competing; and on the other, it has continued the
work of the civilian service the German state required of conscientious objectors
who did not wish to participate in compulsory military service. This paper aims at
examining the impact these traditions have had on the implementation and
institutionalization of the BFD as it seeks to reconcile these two very different
backgrounds.
To this end, and to gain a clearer picture of the political and economic
implications of introducing national voluntary services, we conducted an explorato-
ry study that included a series of twenty-one expert interviews and twelve focus
group interviews in the 2 years following the launch of the BFD (2011, 2012).
Combining insights from decision-makers in central agencies and governmental
institutions with the subjective perspective of 164 volunteers, we wanted to shed
light on the effects that state intervention has on the coordination of volunteer
activities at the meso-level of analysis. To interpret the data gathered in our study,
we mobilized the theory of ‘‘strategic action fields’’ developed by Fligstein and
McAdam (2012), which sees the evolution of institutional fields (Powell and
DiMaggio 1983) as an ongoing competition between incumbents and challengers.
By focusing on the interests and resources marshaled by field agents, we were able
to develop fine-tuned analytical insights into the nature of conflict and competition
in the world of European national voluntary services, as well as possible scenarios
for the evolution of this field.
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National voluntary services are always shaped by historical processes and
traditions of subsidiarity and self-governance (Anheier and Seibel 2001; Zimmer
2001), and the introduction of the BFD set in motion a major transformation of the
field. Our study reveals how the sudden coexistence of civil society and government
programs has done more than simply restructuring relationships among program
agencies, host institutions, educational facilities, and volunteers. The consequences
have been much more far reaching than that: the very nature of volunteering as civic
practice has been called into question. This paper contributes to the critical
understanding of volunteering as a medium for social welfare politics by arguing
that organizational conflicts and structural asymmetries such as the ones observed in
our study are likely to change the way we conceive of volunteering as a civic
practice (Evers 2009). We will open with an overview of the way European welfare
states have treated volunteering from a historical perspective, then examine the
advent of what has been called ‘‘politics of engagement’’ across Europe. In the
paper’s second part, we will discuss our study’s theoretical framework and clarify
our analytical strategy. Part three describes our methodology; part four presents our
empirical findings and discusses their theoretical implications. We will then
conclude with an investigation of the mid- to long-term implications of the
implementation of national voluntary services.
Volunteering and the Welfare State
Theoretical Perspectives on Volunteering
Scholarship on volunteering has generally addressed two political aspects of
volunteering. First of all, the neo-Tocquevillian perspective argues that high levels
of volunteering promote social integration. A second strand of research understands
volunteering primarily as economic resource. We will discuss both views before
turning back to the actual debate that has spurred state intervention.
In 1836, Tocqueville remarked on the importance of associational life in the
newly founded state of America (Tocqueville et al. 2007). Since government
structures were embryonic and concentrated in and around Washington, D.C., the
state was unable to provide legal enforcement or administrative capacity at the local
level. A self-organized citizenry was thus crucial to the development of community
structures and a form of social solidarity (Durkheim 1893; Warren 2001) conducive
to social, political, and economic development in the young nation state. Neo-
Tocquevillian approaches have since provided detailed theoretical and empirical
accounts of the relationship between volunteer work and societal dynamics. Among
the more prominent accounts, Putnam’s theory of social capital argues that
volunteering is a means to develop trust and social awareness within and beyond
local communities, contributing both to social cohesion (Putnam 2000) and to a
lively political culture (Putnam et al. 1993). In the same vein, Clemens (1997) and
(Skocpol 2003) describe voluntary associations as ‘‘schools of citizenship’’
(Clemens 2006) in which political socialization (Fleischacker 1998) and compe-
tence building (Beck and Jennings 1982; Verba et al. 2002) take place, enabling
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citizens to take action. Enthusiasm over the integrative values of volunteer work has
in turn inspired a wide array of studies to examine the factors that shape, foster, or
impede volunteering at the national level (Cadge and Wuthnow 2006; Lim and
MacGregor 2012; Musick et al. 2000). The neo-Tocquevillian tradition sees the
mechanisms of volunteering as deployed from the bottom up (Offe and Fuchs
2002): individuals decide to devote their spare time to a cause (Karl 1998); they
come together to participate in collective actions visible at the aggregate level; the
social capital generated in this way then spills over into other areas. Scholars in this
tradition argue that high degrees of social capital help consolidate political
institutions and state structures.
A second and much younger scholarly tradition has explored the economic
dimension of volunteer work, which views volunteers as human capital, and civic
and community organizations as a nonprofit industry. Anheier and Salamon (1996)
were early notable proponents of this view: in their effort to capture the relative
economic ‘‘value’’ of the nonprofit industry across countries, they generated an
analytical framework with which they converted features of volunteer work that had
hitherto been perceived as incommensurable into economic resources and assets.
They used statistical analysis to convert hours of volunteer work into units of full-
time employment (FTE). In this way, they reframed volunteering as an important
economic resource for nonprofit organizations (Salamon and Anheier 1998, 2006).
Their approach was based on the assumption that organizations with limited budgets
turn to unpaid work as a resource, making it as essential as paid labor to their
operations (Karl 1998). Studies following this line of research have tried to capture
the economic value of volunteer work and to conceptualize the distinction between
volunteer work and the regular labor market (Apinunmahakul et al. 2009). Although
originally confined to the nonprofit industry, the economic approach to volunteering
has gradually broadened to include other sectors (Wilson and Musick 2003; Ruiter
and de Graaf 2009). When volunteering is understood more generally, as a form of
productive ‘‘occupation,’’ it becomes possible to identify new ways to account for
labor market developments related to demographic trends and youth unemployment
(Sherraden et al. 2008; Zimmer and Priller 2000). From this perspective,
volunteering becomes a means to hone the job skills of the unemployed and to
increase their labor market prospects (Bougard 2014; Paine et al. 2013; Strauß
2009). In contrast with the political perspective of the neo-Tocquevillian tradition,
the economic approach to volunteering stresses the possibility of incentivizing
volunteering (Hackl et al. 2012; Hardill and Baines 2007) in order to optimize both
recruitment and the matching of volunteers to specific tasks.
Why Do Governments Promote Volunteering?
Governments’ newfound interest in volunteering should be seen against the
backdrop of these two arguments. In an era characterized by tightened state budgets,
economic crisis, and welfare state liberalism, (Greve 2012; Vis et al. 2011) states
are increasingly turning to volunteering as an economic resource providing social
services as the state cuts back on its social services. Volunteering is also seen as a
means to counteract looming social disintegration caused by demographic trends
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and overall disenchantment with politics. Cast in this light, the volunteer workforce
is a highly attractive target for state policy. The German ‘‘Engagementpolitik’’
(Quednau and Olk 2010) and the ‘‘Big Society’’ debate in Great Britain
(Conservative Party 2010) are two examples among many governmental attempts
to promote active citizenship and volunteering on a national scale. Political
initiatives have also sought to revise the legal framework regulating volunteer work,
and to introduce monitoring systems taking stock of the evolution of the countries’
volunteer workforces. Over the past few years, governments have also begun
promoting new instruments to facilitate recruitment and matching within this
increasingly volatile workforce. Time banking (Collom et al. 2012) and volunteer
offices are notable examples, but the implementation of national voluntary services
is the most far reaching, large-scale, and costly instrument of all. Since 2005,
national voluntary services (NVS) have emerged across Europe: Great Britain,
Sweden, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, and Germany have set up programs that
match volunteers to host institutions. Although national contexts differ, European
NVS share some basic features: they are generally state-run and require a
commitment of 3–18-month from the participant. Programs also differ with regard
to selection criteria—for instance, some have an age limit while others do not—but
they generally offer volunteers the same conditions, which include a full-time
position, a small living allowance, and social security coverage. In addition, they
require volunteers to attend training programs that provide a mix of job-specific
skills, personal development techniques, and civic education.
Overall, the European NVS experiment can be seen as successful, since it has
inspired the European Commission to set up a service of its own (European
Economic and Social Committee 2013).1 However, this generalized view cannot
account for differences observed among specific NVS. From country to country,
social implications, ‘‘embeddedness’’ (Polanyi 1957) in welfare state politics, and
success in mobilizing the volunteer workforce have varied. We argue that two
legacies have played a central role in the way these services emerge and develop. In
countries such as France, Italy, or the Czech Republic, NVS has been introduced to
replace or expand a former civic duty (i.e., a military or civilian service duty), while
in countries such as Great Britain or Sweden, NVS programs are implemented in the
tradition of voluntary services that date back to the early 20th century and have been
perpetuated and upheld by civil society actors and nonprofit organizations. This
study seeks to understand how these two legacies have affected the implementation
and institutionalization of a new volunteering culture. In the spirit of Lascoumes and
Le Gales (2007), we believe that introducing new policy instruments such as NVS
influences the way we think about volunteering. Since governments invest heavily
in these flagship programs and adapt their policies to fit what they learn from
experience, NVS programs have strong impact on future policy decisions and
regulations regarding volunteering. Understanding the two historical legacies
‘‘enacted’’ (Giddens 1984) by NVS—that of civil or military service and that of civil
1 Ulrich Beck and Daniel Cohn-Bandit, both members of the European parliament, launched a petition
for a ‘‘European Year of Volunteering for Everyone’’ in 2014 (Beck and Cohn-Bendit 2014).
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sector nonprofits—allows us to comprehend the meaning structures and regulative
patterns inherited by these powerful tools.
In order to develop systematic insights into the impact of historical legacies on
the way NVS are set up and run, we have chosen to closely examine Germany’s
voluntary service, the BFD, which is one of Europe’s largest and most prominent
service, and has generated media attention both in and outside the country.
Furthermore, because the BFD was built on the combined legacies of the civilian
service and civil sector volunteering, it represents an ‘‘extreme case’’ (Gerring
2007),2 making it particularly germane to our analytical interest. The following
section will describe the theoretical framework of this study as well as concrete
analytical avenues for interpreting our findings.
Theoretical Framework
Our analytical framework must combine awareness of the two historical legacies
(Hall and Taylor 1996) behind the implementation of the BFD and an acute sense of
organizational implications, vested interests, and underlying meaning structures.
Neo-institutional theory is ideally adapted to the task. Because it accounts for the
regulative, normative, and cognitive aspects (Scott 2014) of organizational life,
institutional theory draws our attention to the long-term effects of change. In the
case at hand, the government, by implementing a new program, actively shapes and
reframes what volunteering is about, thereby challenging the social order in place. It
makes the organizational framework in which volunteering and voluntary services
have been implemented over the past 50 years obsolete, and to some extent even
redundant. This generates conflict and negotiations over the future of voluntary
services in Germany. In other words, it creates a problem of social—or rather
institutional—change, insofar as boundaries are questioned and established meaning
structures are opened up for discussion (Seo and Creed 2002). The current public
debate taking place in Germany on the nature of volunteer work points to the wider
societal implications of the reform process we discuss in this paper: Who should
volunteer and under what conditions? What are the goals of the service and who
should pay for it (e.g., Anheier et al. 2012; Klaubert 2011; Schoener 2013)?
Challengers and Incumbents: A Theory of Fields
We chose to apply the theory of strategic action fields as developed by Fligstein and
McAdam (2012) to analyze the implementation of the BFD in a systematic manner
and to explain the structural and normative features of this unique process. The
theory of organizational fields this analytical framework draws on has a long
tradition in neo-institutional analysis. In their seminal contribution, ‘‘The Iron Cage
2 Though similar reform measures were implemented in Italy and France, we argue that Germany depicts
an extreme case. In Germany, the number of people opting for the civilian service was extremely high (up
to 135,000 young men per year) compared to other countries. By the year 2000, more than fifty percent of
all young and able men committed themselves to one year of civilian service, thereby contributing
significantly to the provision of social services, especially in the care sector (BMFSFJ 2011).
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Revisited’’, DiMaggio and Powell (1983) called for a change of focus in
organizational analysis so as to include ‘‘organizations that, in the aggregate,
constitute a recognized area of institutional life; key suppliers, resource and product
consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar
services or products’’ (DiMaggio and Powell 1983, p. 148–149). Organizational
field approaches examine the way organizational communities evolve over time by
investigating organizational interdependencies; they understand change as emerging
from social control (DiMaggio 1991), competition, or conflict within the field. Over
the years, organizational field studies have developed and refined their theoretical
arguments, providing extensive empirical evidence for the mechanisms of field
evolution (Wooten and Hoffman 2008). However, this approach lacked a theory of
power capable of providing an analytical strategy to investigate how organizations
or organizational subpopulations manage to forestall, curb, or resist change; or, to
the contrary, how they initiate and enforce it (DiMaggio 1988). The systematic
approach to institutional agency in organizational fields developed by Fligstein and
McAdam offered such a strategy by drawing on the tradition of Bourdieu’s field
theory (1993) and on the social movement perspective (Sherraden et al. 2008).
Fligstein and McAdam define a strategic action field as a social order in which
incumbents and challengers compete for the same resources. Incumbents are the
organizations and organizational subsets located at the center of the field structure,
and they enjoy privileged access to resources and regulatory agencies. Their
structural position allows them to impose and to some extent control the ‘‘rules of
the game’’ (North 1991), subjecting everyone in the field to their normative
framework. Challengers share none of the privileges of the ruling elite, and try to
push for alternative ways of doing things. They must either comply with the social
order in place by adhering to institutionalized practices, or attempt to change the
system from within. Social change depends on the resources challengers are able to
mobilize in order to destabilize incumbents and question established practices. Seen
from this perspective, conflict and competition among the organizational represen-
tatives of different institutional alternatives is the main driver of institutional
change.
Voluntary Services as a Strategic Action Field
We argue that the introduction of a national voluntary service has sparked dramatic
change in the field of voluntary services in Germany. Since the 1960s, civil society
organizations have operated youth volunteering services that enroll up to 50,000
young men and women per year. Although heavily subsidized by the state, these
civil society organizations enjoyed a great deal of autonomy in the way they
implemented and monitored the services. The state’s introduction of the BFD, a
program that bears several similarities with existing youth voluntary services, has
turned civil society organizations into competitors for financial resources, potential
volunteers, willing host institutions, and of course public attention. The analytical
strategy we will apply takes into account the regulatory, economic, and ideological
dimensions of this coexistence. We are particularly interested in the implications
this structural rearrangement has had on the prevalent ‘‘logics’’ (Friedland and
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Alford 1991; Thornton et al. 2012; Skelcher and Rathgeb Smith 2014) of
volunteering in Germany.
Data and method
Our analysis draws on the empirical findings of an exploratory study that began on
the day the national voluntary service was launched. Using a mixed methods design,
we conducted interviews at different levels (twenty-one expert interviews and focus
group interviews with 164 volunteers) and triangulated our empirical data with
insights generated by the analysis of policy documents and with official statistical
data provided by the Bundesamt fur Familie und zivilgesellschaftliche Aufgaben
(the Federal Office for Family and Civil Society, known as the BAFzA). In addition
to this, we analyzed the content of media and online discussion fora from July 2011
to January 2013. Since these fora were mostly used by prospective and former BFD
volunteers, this database enabled us to reconstruct the implementation of this new
service from the perspective of the volunteers.
The expert interviews aimed at taking the perspective of the most important
actors in the field of voluntary services in Germany into account, including the
‘‘incumbent’’ civil society actors and the ‘‘challenging’’ state actors. We therefore
contacted the representatives of all central agencies in charge of implementing the
BFD in the German voluntary sector, including the Federal Office for Family and
Civil Society. In total, we communicated with twenty organizations involved in the
implementation of the national voluntary service in Germany. We then selected a
sample of nine representative organizations, which entails not only the main free
welfare associations involved in both the BFD and their very own youth voluntary
service, but cover also the main fields of volunteering activity (social services,
environment, culture, and sports). We interviewed the department chief responsible
for the BFD at the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, as well as three senior
administrators from the central state agency in charge of the training of the
volunteer workforce. The remaining interviews were conducted with experts and
practitioners in these organizations, such as the teaching staff of the state training
institutions, who interact with volunteers on a daily basis. All persons interviewed
had direct responsibilities within the BFD, either on a strategic or on an operational
level. While most of the interviews were carried out with a single expert, five
organizations were represented by multiple experts. The interviews were semi-
structured, lasted between 30 and 70 min, and all but one were conducted face-to-
face. We focused on open-ended questions, concentrating on the organization’s
perception of the BFD in general and asking about the changes, opportunities, and
challenges this new voluntary service brought with it. In all cases, we were
particularly interested in the relationship between nonprofits and federal agencies.
The main goal of our twelve focus group interviews was to include the subjective
perceptions of the volunteers in the service. About half of the focus groups were
conducted with volunteers aged twenty-seven or younger, and the other half with
‘‘older’’ volunteers, who are a new target group for voluntary services. Focus groups
were sampled to control for regional diversity and fields of activity. We asked the
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volunteers how they became aware of the BFD, about their motivation to join the
service, why they chose this new format of volunteering, what they expected of
volunteering, and how their BFD commitment was perceived by friends, family, and
society. The focus group interviews lasted between 30 and 60 min.
All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. We content analyzed the
data (Miles and Huberman 1994) using Atlas.ti (Friese 2012), with a coding scheme
inspired by the theoretical framework developed by Fligstein and McAdams (2012).
We were interested in understanding the way agents mobilize resources, experience
constraints, and exert power. Combining different data sources proved to be an
effective way to capture ongoing processes of change and adaption. By including
empirical data from different levels and perspectives as well as observing and
engaging with the field for over 18 months, we were able to draw a comprehensive
picture of it. Below, we present the main findings of our analysis, drawing attention
to the structural and normative conflicts involved in the implementation of the BFD.
Volunteering as an Affair of State
The Tradition of Voluntary Services in Germany
The tradition of voluntary services in Germany can be traced back to a volunteering
project initiated in the early 1950s by the Diakonie, a welfare organization of the
Protestant church. Several Protestant parishes came together to create a new
program that would provide a legal and structural framework for young women who
wished to commit to a social cause on a full-time basis. The program spread quickly
through the Protestant community and was centralized by the end of the 1950s
(Jakob 1993). Other welfare organizations soon followed (Zimmer et al. 2009), and
similar programs were implemented by the Catholic Church (Caritas), the German
Red Cross (Deutsches Rotes Kreuz), and the worker’s movement (Der Paritatische
Gesamtverband, Arbeiterwohlfahrt).
By 1964, the German parliament decided that these rapidly growing voluntary
programs required a common regulatory framework and passed a law specifying the
types of tasks that could be assigned to youth volunteers. It also introduced a
common framework for remuneration and set accreditation criteria for organizations
that wished to offer such programs. Most significantly, it defined the nature of these
service programs, framing them as educational in order to draw a clear boundary
between regular labor and volunteer labor. The law on voluntary services thus
stipulates that service programs must ‘‘further the educational competence of youths
and represent a special form of civic engagement’’ (BGBl. I: 842). Concretely, this
means that volunteers must receive at least 25 days of training per year in an
accredited training facility. Since that time, youth voluntary services provided by
civil society organizations have expanded both in scale and scope, enrolling up to
50,000 youths per year and providing them with work opportunities and intensive
training in fields such as social services, culture, education, environment, and sports.
In 2002, a reform act allowed young and able men to choose between state civilian
service and voluntary service with a civil society program, increasing youth
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voluntary services enrolment even further. The civil society sector now features
over 400 administrative units and training centers, as well as thousands of host
institutions (Engels et al. 2005, p. 64). Although the Federal Ministry of Family
Affairs provides significant funding to youth voluntary programs (up to €200 per
enrollee per month since 2012), free welfare associations have always had to
supplement this funding in order to maintain the quality of training and supervision
for which they are renowned.
The Tradition of Civilian Service in Germany
For over half a century, free welfare associations have thus played a dominant role
in structuring and shaping the profile of voluntary services in Germany. As their
influence grew, the German government began developing plans for a voluntary
service of its own. For decades, the German government had debated the idea of
abandoning its compulsory military service, which was established in 1953 to
protect the country’s eastern boundaries. Since the late 1980s, its critics have argued
that compulsory military service is poorly adapted to national security needs, and
that the German military should be professionalized and better trained (Steinbach
2011). But the government’s reluctance to end compulsory military service had little
or nothing to do with national defense and security; in fact, it was concerned with
the impact it would have on civilian service, and therefore on social services in
Germany. Civilian service, established in 1961 to place conscientious objectors as
workforce in public organizations, rapidly caught on as a popular alternative to
military service. Although early participants met with a certain degree of social
prejudice and criticism, the service proved an efficient means of providing human
resources to social and educational services, particularly at the communal level
0
50000
100000
150000
200000
250000
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
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2008
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2010
military service civilian service
Graph 1 Enrollment rates in Germany’s services. Source: www.zivildienst.de, www.wehrdienst.de
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(Lubking 2010). Civilian service, because it provided an important and reliable
workforce for small towns and villages, gained wide acceptance, and enrollment
rates grew substantially. In 2010, the number of men opting for civilian service
surpassed the number that chose military service (see Graph 1). That year, the
Federal Office in charge of civilian service matched up to 135,000 able young men
to host institutions in both the public and civil society sector. Conscientious
objectors were particularly welcome in fields traditionally short of qualified labor,
such as elder care (BMFSFJ 2002). Suspending compulsory military service, in
other words, was a greater threat to social policy than it was to national security, and
raised the question of how the loss to the workforce in the social service sector
would be compensated (Weise et al. 2010). Furthermore, it raised the issue of the
fate of the Federal Office for Civilian Service (BMFSFJ 2010).
Introducing the ‘‘Bundesfreiwilligendienst’’
Since it was necessary to fill the vacuum left by the end of compulsory military—
and therefore civilian—service, the circumstances that accompanied the introduc-
tion of a national voluntary service in Germany were essentially bureaucratic (Offe
2001; Mayntz 1985). What to do with the existing infrastructure? How to
compensate for the workforce lost to public social services? In 2010, Germany’s
then minister of defense, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, finally decided to ‘‘suspend’’
both compulsory military and civilian services. Because a suspension is theoretical-
ly a temporary state, the civilian service administration could not be dissolved,
which allowed the government to rededicate it to another purpose. It was proposed
that the former Federal Office for Civilian Service be mandated with the
introduction of a national voluntary service, under the aegis of the Federal Ministry
of Family Affairs. The proposal was made into law on April 28th 2011 (BFDG
2011). Three months later, the first volunteers were matched to host institutions
within the BFD program (Backhaus-Maul et al. 2011). The accelerated implemen-
tation process gave rise to a great deal of insecurity over the BFD and its
implications, as this interviewee recalls:
We did not know anything at that time. Well, we did know that we would have
volunteers and that these volunteers were to be paid and trained. We knew that
organization-wise, we were dealing with an arrangement including the
ministry [of Family Affairs], the Federal Office [BAFzA], so called central
agencies, and host institutions; and that was it. We are still coping with the
consequences of this change: 1 year after the introduction of the BFD, there is
no guideline for implementation and decision makers are considering
changing the legal framework once again’’ (senior manager of a central
agency/nonprofit; E_12:15).
Volunteers felt this confusion, as well. They experienced the newly established
BFD as opaque, encountered difficulties in choosing a voluntary program, and had
trouble communicating what they were doing to family and friends:
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Mostly, I just tell them that I am doing civilian service. Everyone knows what
this is and what I am doing (BFD male volunteer working; F_:77).
The data we gathered provides insights into the field one and a half years after the
law was passed, allowing us to capture the essential features of this complex
rearrangement. Our analysis will therefore proceed in two steps. First, we will
examine the structural aspects of the reform process; that is, the reallocation of
resources among actors in the field through the introduction of the BFD. In doing so,
we will shed light on the nature of competition among organizations and programs
in the field of voluntary services. Then we will explore the normative dimension of
this process of change by contrasting the different visions of volunteering enacted in
the BFD and in non-state youth voluntary services.
One Regulation Fits All?
One of the most striking features of the BFD’s implementation process is that it
adopted the existing legal framework of the youth voluntary service. This means
that both types of service operate under nearly identical legal conditions, and share
basic structural features, such as the living allowance, social security coverage, and
the educational mission. It should be noted that in order to be accredited as a
voluntary service, the BFD had to include 25 days of training per year in its
program, of which at least five must be devoted to civic education. This training
must take place in an accredited training center (either public or nonprofit). Two
formerly separate fields, state civilian service and nonprofit youth voluntary
services, have been merged into a unique ‘‘field of voluntary services’’ where
service providers work within a common legal framework under the common
supervision of the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs.
This is, however, where the commonalities end. Since the BFD was launched as
an addition to existing civil society programs, and not to replace them, the reform
has effectively created a problematic double structure. Youth voluntary services
continue to operate within the same legal, financial, and organizational arrange-
ments as before 2011. At the same time, a government agency, piggybacking on
structures inherited from the old civilian service, was able to quickly implement a
voluntary service program and match up to 35,000 volunteers per year. While most
of these volunteers are sent to host institutions that previously worked with civilian
service enrollees, the BFD also matches a significant portion of its volunteers to
civil society organizations operating under the youth voluntary framework. This
means that a substantial number of civil society organizations now host both youth
volunteers as well as BFD volunteers. In order to manage the placement, the Federal
Office for Family and Civil Society has delegated a great deal of administrative
work to intermediary agencies (Braun 1993) known as ‘‘central agencies’’
(Zentralstellen), which manage funds, the matching process, and volunteer files
on its behalf. Currently, twenty such agencies are operating throughout Germany.
Nineteen of these agencies are attached to free welfare associations and match BFD
volunteers primarily to host institutions in the nonprofit sector. One of them is
public. The public agency is an integrative part of the Federal Office for Family and
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Civil Society and administers roughly 15,000 BFD volunteers, nearly half of its
workforce. As a result, the organizational arrangements of nonprofit youth voluntary
services have been expanded in order to host BFD volunteers, and the Federal Office
for Family and Civil Society is not only in charge of implementing the BFD, but is
directly involved in managing volunteers through its very own central agency. This
central role has provoked open criticism from free welfare associations which have
objected that the Federal Office has too much influence over volunteer services as a
whole:
One of the greatest dilemmas with the BFD is the authority the state has in the
overall implementation process. As central agency, we are consulted and
included in some of the negotiations. But in reality, the state has the last word
in everything (senior manager at a central agency in a free welfare association;
E_12:67).
These critiques (Jakob 2011) come at a time when welfare associations are
starting to feel the effects of competition between the BFD and the youth voluntary
services. Since the subsidies for BFD volunteers are slightly better than for civil
society programs, a number of civil society organizations that previously worked
with youth voluntary services are now switching to the BFD. This tendency has
been reinforced by the fact that the public central agency—in contrast to its civil
society counterparts—does not take administrative fees for the services it provides
to host institutions. Small nonprofits and civil society organizations with tight
budgets therefore have an incentive to opt out of partnerships with the youth
voluntary service. The restructuring of German voluntary services exhibits
asymmetries of a regulative and economic nature that would seem to give the
state-run BFD an advantage over civil society programs. This situation has
generated controversy among free welfare associations, which perceive political
developments as having them cast by the wayside, despite their having provided
both the legal and organizational templates adopted by the BFD.
Conflicting Perspectives on Volunteer Education
Structural rearrangements have sparked competition between the BFD and youth
voluntary services. Although the question of access to resources has caused heated
debates among the central agents in the field, the core of the conflict is essentially
normative. Two points stand out with regard to this specific dimension of
institutional change, the first one regarding the volunteering ethos enacted by these
programs, and the second concerning the political ‘‘embeddedness’’ (Polanyi 1957)
of voluntary services.
As explained earlier in this article, education is a core element in the mission of
all voluntary services, and separates volunteer labor from the ordinary labor market.
In the youth voluntary services operated by civil society organizations, the
educational mission has developed into a comprehensive pedagogical program that
frames the volunteer as a ‘‘Bildungsmensch’’ (senior manager of a free welfare
association implementing the BFD; E_8), i.e., a youth on a journey of self-
discovery. Training is designed to create individual and collective experiences that
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help youth volunteers to find their own path. Since voluntary services are present in
a variety of fields, such as health care, culture, education, sports, and the
environment, citizens have the opportunity to learn about and engage with a wide
range of issues. By developing their civic skills and becoming aware of and
informed about social and political issues in a setting separate from parents and
school, youth volunteers are free to forge their own identities and opinions. With
this end in mind, the 25 day training programs that take place in the training centers
of civil society organizations are characterized by closely supervised immersive
settings seeking to foster a group-based learning environment. This normative
dimension of youth voluntary services stands out when compared to the training
program operated by the BFD. The BFD requires that at least 5 days of the 25
training period be spent in state-operated training centers,3 which, before the reform,
trained conscientious objectors participating in the civilian service. The BFD has
taken over the educational agenda of the civilian service, as well as its facilities. As
a result, the staff structure in the state training centers has changed very little since
the transition. The core goal of these centers is to form ‘‘good citizens’’. Teachers
focus on civic education and preparing youth for taking on ‘‘responsibility,’’ come
to terms with ‘‘adulthood’’ (BAFzA 2013), and on imparting the technical
knowledge volunteers require to carry out their work.4 This teaching philosophy
contrasts starkly with the one applied in youth voluntary programs, and because
state training centers are expected to cooperate closely with civil society
organizations, normative differences often give rise to incomprehension and
conflict. Supervision is a major point of contention, along with the question of
whether volunteers ought to be seen as ‘‘responsible adults’’ or as youth under the
ward and care of their program leaders, as the following quote illustrates:
There was one situation that is symptomatic for the cultural misunderstandings
we experience. The members of the teaching staff of the [free welfare
association] arrived one night and the first thing they did was to plant their flag
in our leisure area—right in front of our information board where we have
listed all the things you can do in [the city]. You know, where you can go out.
We asked the team why they did that […] and they said that they put up their
flag at exactly that spot because they did not want people to read the info we
put there. We were shocked by the manipulative and patronizing behavior of
the team. This pedagogy is completely alien to us. We believe that we can talk
to each other as equals. But they were afraid that reading this information
3 While BFD volunteers are legally under the administrative responsibility of the state central agency and
receive all their training from federal training centers, the situation is more complex for BFD volunteers
assigned to civil society organizations. These volunteers receive 20 days of training in one of the
accredited youth voluntary training centers, during which they socialize with volunteers participating in
the civil society programs. Five days are then spent with other BFD volunteers in one of the state training
facilities.4 Our focus group interviews revealed that the volunteers’ motivations and expectations regarding their
training vary significantly. Especially, young volunteers tend to enroll in the BFD so as to gain new
experiences, while older volunteers are more interested in updating their skills for the labor market (see
Beller and Haß 2014).
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might give the youngsters the wrong idea (faculty of a state training center;
E_11:7).
The teaching staff of civil society training centers criticizes the staff of state
training centers for their lack of pedagogical commitment and didactic skills, while
the teaching staff at state training centers maintains that youth voluntary services
exert systematic control over youth that both patronizes them and impedes the
development of their capacity for independent thought and action. With a month of
volunteers’ 12-month service commitment dedicated to training, teaching objectives
and philosophies have a strong impact on programs’ volunteer culture. Civil society
training centers continue to cast themselves as partners in the journey to self-
discovery, and although state training centers have begun reforming their curricula
by adding soft skill seminars and updating their teaching material, they have
continued to uphold the educational philosophy they inherited from civilian service,
which emphasizes civic education and technical skills that can be turned into job
skills later on:
The education philosophy and the vision of these services are definitely very
different. […] Our pedagogy [in the BFD] is very much focused on the
transfer of technical skills. We believe that this is what our volunteers want.
This is, however, a sensitive issue with the central agencies [of the welfare
association]. They basically want the BFD to be about personal development,
you know. But we say: this is an educational experience! Personal
development, but also professional reorientation, social reorientation, civic
engagement, and so on. Lifelong Learning, this is what we say (senior
administrator of the BAFZA; E_16:115).
On the Political Embeddedness of Voluntary Services
The political embeddedness of the two volunteer services differs with regard to the
type of volunteer they target: Youth voluntary services target young volunteers,
between the ages of sixteen and twenty-seven, while the state-operated BFD is open
to all men and women over the age of sixteen. Indeed, about forty percent of BFD
volunteers are over 27 years old. Our focus group interviews showed that
motivations for enrollment in voluntary service vary significantly with age. This
makes the educational mission of the BFD a challenging one. When educational
goals differ among students from different generations, it is difficult to establish a
curriculum that suits all participants. Even more problematically, approximately
two-thirds of older volunteers were unemployed before enrolling in their program
(Huth et al. 2013). The legal framework of the BFD is especially attractive to
jobseekers because it allows unemployed people to cumulate unemployment
benefits and a portion of the BFD living allowance (up to €200 per month).
Moreover, because volunteers have access to social security, the long-term
unemployed can apply for more lucrative unemployment benefits (‘‘Arbeitslosen-
geld I’’) upon completion of their BFD contract. The BFD also provides the
opportunity for out-of-work citizens to update their labor skills and try a new
occupation, which increases the likelihood of finding jobs afterward. This has led
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job centers to advise unemployed people to commit to 1 year of BFD service so as
to increase their employment prospects, a practice that has sparked some
controversy.5
Clearly, the BFD has significant implications for the labor market that are
challenging the embeddedness of voluntary services in the realm of education
policy, thereby changing the way people think about volunteering in Germany.
While youth voluntary services are often seen as a high-profile educational program
for well-educated young persons, the state-run BFD is considered as a catch-all
program intended for people struggling to enter the job market. Thus, while the BFD
is inclusive in terms of gender, educational background, and age, its inclusiveness
has a downside: the ‘‘one size fits all’’ philosophy makes it hard to satisfy the
heterogeneous needs of its volunteers and stakeholders.
Conclusion
In the German ‘‘field of voluntary services’’, two types of volunteering tradition
have been grafted together: one that is anchored in civil society, and one with its
roots in the state’s civilian service. By building our analytical strategy on the
explanatory framework proposed by Fligstein and McAdam’s ‘‘Theory of fields’’,
we were able to capture different institutional dimensions of this arrangement and
revealed three interrelated developments:
First the emerging rivalry between the BFD and the youth voluntary services
provided by civil society organizations has structural as well as normative
implications. Civil society organizations, the field’s incumbents, were deeply
involved in designing the German voluntary service experience. Indeed, they were
at the origin of the detailed legal framework that regulates volunteering in Germany.
Their dominant position was however challenged by the introduction of the BFD in
2011. This state-run program broadened the traditional focus on young, well-
educated men and women. Since volunteers and host institutions now have the
option to choose between two types of services—i.e., the high-profile youth
voluntary services run by civil society organizations or the inclusive state program
BFD, competition has emerged between the state service and civil society programs
for economic resources, partners, and social recognition.
Second, although structural asymmetries currently favor a logic of volunteering
grounded in the civilian service tradition, there is no telling how the future of
volunteering services in Germany will unfold. Recently, a working group that
included representatives of the free welfare associations and state agents was
formed to discuss and shape future policy work. The German government has plans
to cut funding for all types of voluntary services, on which it currently spends about
5 This controversy adds to the general debate on monetarization of civic engagement and economic
incentives for volunteers. Although this debate is not new, it reached a new level in German society with
the controversial implementation of the BFD, a voluntary service that is open for all ages (see also Perabo
2015.
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€600 million per year.6 Growing public criticism of governmental spending, as well
as recent mismanagement scandals in the Federal Office for Family and Civil
Society, have led the public and policy makers to call for reform, and the
2013–2017 policy agenda requests the rationalization of existing structures as well
as the development of a single coherent voluntary service framework for all.
Understanding the way interests and ideas inherited from the past shape the future
prospects of voluntary service in Germany is therefore of pressing concern. For the
moment, no one knows whether one logic or actor will triumph over the other, or
whether they will successfully blend into a common hybrid program. In light of this
looming question, our analysis has sought to identify the different interests at stake
and to disentangle the various logics likely to have an impact on the reform process.
Finally, voluntary services were introduced in the context of changing welfare
state politics. In an era when volunteer labor is increasingly seen as a buffer capable
of absorbing the shock of budget cuts to public services, and as a force for stronger
social cohesion, voluntary services are perceived as a powerful way to mobilize and
socialize the volunteer workforce. As new national voluntary services emerge across
Europe, they have gained increasing attention as a policy instrument. This paper
sheds light on the mechanisms of this new instrument by showing how state
intervention has significantly challenged volunteering traditions in Germany. The
close monitoring that accompanies the implementation of national voluntary
services is likely to inform volunteering policies on a more general scale, thereby
influencing the future outlook of a country’s volunteering programs in terms of both
culture and practice.
Acknowledgments The authors thank Annelie Beller for her continuous support during the data
collection period. We also thank Filip Wijkstrom, Adalbert Evers and the PACS seminar at Stanford
University for their insightful comments of earlier drafts of this paper.
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