The place of professional knowledge and skills in the practice of volunteering for the socially oriented non-profit sector of the regions of Russia
On March 1, 2023, the ILSIR seminar was held, dedicated to the report of the Senior Research Fellow of the ILSIR Konstantin Obukhov on the topic "The place of professional knowledge and skills in the practice of volunteering for the socially oriented non-profit sector of the regions of Russia".
The debater was a Research Assistant of the ILSIR Polina Guseva.
Volunteering today is a fairly common concept that is actively used in the social sphere and in the field of human resource management around the world. This concept is associated with the designation of a whole range of social forms of interaction, most of them refer to voluntary and gratuitous assistance of various types. The research interest of specialists in the socio-humanitarian field of knowledge is primarily caused by the reasons that encourage people to spend their time and effort on gratuitous assistance. This issue becomes especially important when volunteers apply professional skills in a situation of organized activity, due to the lack of a clear financial incentive in the implementation of labor functions. The study of such practices makes it possible to fix outside the financial, organizational and social grounds for the implementation of professional activities.
Issues related to the mechanisms of attracting professionals to volunteer activities have been studied for a long time and in detail on the materials of Western Europe and the USA. Volunteer participation in the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe is considered in less detail and in detail, in particular, in the studies of these countries less attention is paid to the dissemination of practices of providing professional assistance free of charge. But the accumulated material demonstrates the existence of discrepancies in the mechanisms of participation of volunteers in the provision of social assistance in different countries. Research in Russia in this regard remains rather fragmentary and focuses on the study of general issues of volunteer participation without reference to the application of professional skills in the volunteer environment or the environment of socially oriented non-profit organizations. Even if there is such a perspective, organizations and volunteers of specific information platforms, megacities and large cities, or individual professional groups (lawyers, doctors, translators) are subject to study.
Konstantin Obukhov's speech focused on the forms of organization of volunteer work requiring professional skills and knowledge that currently exist in socially oriented non-profit organizations in the regions of Russia. Based on semi-structured interviews with managers of socially oriented non-profit organizations, existing models of interaction between employees of socially oriented non-profit organizations with volunteers with professional skills and knowledge to involve them in the activities of the socially oriented sector were identified.
The following issues were raised during the discussion: the relevance of using P. Bourdieu's theoretical and methodological framework to study the specifics of converting various kinds of capital in the situation of professional volunteering; possible ways of sociological definition of professional volunteering in the social sphere; the role of corporate social responsibility in the development of professional volunteering; the practical significance of the research results for employees of socially oriented non-profit organizations and volunteers.
Polina Guseva noted that the collected data make it possible to present volunteering professionally in the non-profit sector of Russia in a new way, to identify important hypotheses for subsequent research work, in particular in the framework of quantitative research.
The video of the seminar is available on the YouTube-channel of our Laboratory.