ABSTRACT
What is volunteering? A recent review (Hustinx et al., 2010) has concluded that volunteering is challenging to dene, rstly because it is a social construct and secondly because it is studied across a range of disciplines which attribute dierent meanings and functions to it. Hustinx et al. also articulate a further diculty in that theoretical accounts of volunteering are biased towards methodological approaches in which the variable ‘volunteering’ is explained by a causal
relationship with other variables, such as age, gender, etc., and this has tended to ignore the complexity of the concept.
