Entrepreneurial Volunteering: Sense of Participation
Name: ROBERTA ATHERTON MAGALHÃES DIAS
Publication date: 28/05/2008
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| MARTA ZORZAL E SILVA | External Examiner * |
Summary: The purpose of this work is to analyze the subjective senses in taking part in a volunteering business program for professional volunteers. By assuming that to practice volunteering under the guidelines of an organizational program is incipient, thus considering this perspective, an analysis that takes into account its subjective dimension becomes urgent, from the employees‟ participation as well as social interactions that take place in it. The volunteers‟ participation is taken as an object of study at the extent of the Business Volunteering Program, namely Vale Volunteers Vitória, which is part of Vale Foundation. The methodology used has had as its support the qualitative epistemology proposed by González Rey, and this included 40 volunteers. The instruments used in this research were: interview, conversational dynamics, phrase completion and documentary research. The developed analysis deals with the program corporate framework, thus characterizing its implementation and management process, as well as the way of organizing the citizens‟ participation. This also approaches the elements that ease and or inhibit the volunteers in engaging in it, and the senses it represents to those ones. The results clearly show the potentialities and limits of taking part in the volunteering program. Since enrolling the volunteers in the program, sharing policies and guidelines, fostering participation through volunteering meetings, Day V and portal use, the challenges of local relationship performed by the program facilitator and committee members, among other factors about interactions that are set up in volunteering actions. The subjective senses taking part in the volunteering program pass by the volunteering practice from nuclei of identified senses in the history of life of each volunteer. Also, some elements about personal accomplishment are identified such as need of acknowledgment, sensation of well-being, occupying the idle time, a way of overflowing feelings and the outstanding presence of religion. Some subjective senses linked to professional life have been verified, assuming a way of job replacement, participation from identifying the company and exchange relationship with it, as well as the interaction motivated by learning and professional improvement through this practice. The fragility of volunteering performance of many participants is also well-known. Understanding the volunteering program itself, the needs that are placed to taking part in it as well, as the senses it represents to the organizational extent, points to a sympathetic participation, which is foreign to assumptions of a democratic and participatory project of society.
