Making Change a Natural, Desirable and Continual State: A Critical Examination of Volunteer-based Sport Associational Development

This paper addresses organizational education and change processes within the voluntary sector. Volunteerism has been a hot topic on the political agenda in recent years. Welfare states are under pressure due to economic crisis, ageing populations, rising public expectations, etc., and embracing volunteers seems to be a common way to accommodate the crisis. The EU have designated a European Year of Volunteering. In the UK, politicians have talked about building a ‘Big Society’. And in Scandinavia, national programmes aimed at involving civil society and its voluntary organizations in the handling of a variety of welfare issues have been launched. Researchers talk about there discovery of volunteerism on the political agenda (Rochester 2013) and the close relationship between the public sector and the voluntary sector is diligently discussed under labels such as co-production (Verschuere, Brandsen, and Pestoff 2012), partnerships (Bode and Brandsen 2014), and collaborative innovation (Hartley, Sørensen, and Torfing 2013). In many countries sport constitutes the largest area of volunteerism, and also in this field volunteers and their organizations are increasingly expected to act as welfare policy teammates by participating in a variety of collaborative projects and partnerships with public organizations (Groeneveld 2009, Waardenburg 2016).