Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Fri Feb 3 06:43:34 PST 2012
shag: " what the well off do to "volunteer" is, ahem, nothing like what a poor person does. a well to do person chairs meetings, telling others what to do, including the person who actually does the project management. a less well off person, you know, paints the women's shelter and plants shrubs at a daycare center for low income families."
[WS:] Absolutely. Not just different kinds of work but also different conceptualizations of it. My favorite line by a working class person asked if he volunteers "Society ladies volunteer, we help each other." That is why we always recommend abstaining from using the world volunteering in the survey and instead using field tested descriptive terms (I do this stuff for a living, you may check http://www.unv.org/en/news-resources/resources/on-volunteerism/doc/measuring-volunteering-toolkit.html and http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@dgreports/@stat/documents/publication/wcms_162119.pdf).
As far as the September Supplement to the CPS (a tool that the BLS uses to measure volunteering in the US - which I used as a reference) they do use term "volunteer" but they also have a follow up question in which they give some descriptive examples. However, they measure only volunteering through organizations, which may produce skewed results since poor people are more likely to help each other directly rather than through organizations. We tried to estimate both organizational and direct volunteering in developed and developing countries http://ccss.jhu.edu/publications-findings?did=321 and it seems that the rate of direct/organizational volunteering is higher in the Global South than in the Global North. With that in mind, I think that distribution of volunteering by education would look differently from what the BLS data show, had the direct volunteering been counted.
Having said that - volunteering is likely to play different roles in different social classes that rely on different forms of cultural and social capital (which is a straightforward interpretation of Bourdieu's "Distinctions.") That was the point of my argument - what appears as differences in "charitable" behavior associated with political views may in fact be differences due to social class.
RE: "> *from gouldner: "sociologists keep two sets of books, one for the study of
> 'laymen' and another when he thinks about himself....the sociologist"
[WS:] I am not sure I understand the relevance of this reference. Sociology is probably one of the most reflexive sciences - more eager to systematically examine biases brought by the observer (sociologist) and observation process than all other sciences, except anthropology. So if such bias is noted by a sociologist, it is a result of the fact that its being systematically looked for rather than due to greater incidence of it in sociology than elsewhere. If i were to name one discipline that is least reflexive and most systematically oblivious to its own biases, it would be the "dismal science" not sociology.
Wojtek
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Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Fri Feb 3 06:43:34 PST 2012
shag: " what the well off do to "volunteer" is, ahem, nothing like what a poor person does. a well to do person chairs meetings, telling others what to do, including the person who actually does the project management. a less well off person, you know, paints the women's shelter and plants shrubs at a daycare center for low income families."
[WS:] Absolutely. Not just different kinds of work but also different conceptualizations of it. My favorite line by a working class person asked if he volunteers "Society ladies volunteer, we help each other." That is why we always recommend abstaining from using the world volunteering in the survey and instead using field tested descriptive terms (I do this stuff for a living, you may check http://www.unv.org/en/news-resources/resources/on-volunteerism/doc/measuring-volunteering-toolkit.html and http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@dgreports/@stat/documents/publication/wcms_162119.pdf).
As far as the September Supplement to the CPS (a tool that the BLS uses to measure volunteering in the US - which I used as a reference) they do use term "volunteer" but they also have a follow up question in which they give some descriptive examples. However, they measure only volunteering through organizations, which may produce skewed results since poor people are more likely to help each other directly rather than through organizations. We tried to estimate both organizational and direct volunteering in developed and developing countries http://ccss.jhu.edu/publications-findings?did=321 and it seems that the rate of direct/organizational volunteering is higher in the Global South than in the Global North. With that in mind, I think that distribution of volunteering by education would look differently from what the BLS data show, had the direct volunteering been counted.
Having said that - volunteering is likely to play different roles in different social classes that rely on different forms of cultural and social capital (which is a straightforward interpretation of Bourdieu's "Distinctions.") That was the point of my argument - what appears as differences in "charitable" behavior associated with political views may in fact be differences due to social class.
RE: "> *from gouldner: "sociologists keep two sets of books, one for the study of
> 'laymen' and another when he thinks about himself....the sociologist"
[WS:] I am not sure I understand the relevance of this reference. Sociology is probably one of the most reflexive sciences - more eager to systematically examine biases brought by the observer (sociologist) and observation process than all other sciences, except anthropology. So if such bias is noted by a sociologist, it is a result of the fact that its being systematically looked for rather than due to greater incidence of it in sociology than elsewhere. If i were to name one discipline that is least reflexive and most systematically oblivious to its own biases, it would be the "dismal science" not sociology.
Wojtek
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