Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
BSA 2024 Virtual Conference: Crisis, Contiuity and Change, London, İngiltere, 3 - 05 Nisan 2024, ss.56-57
Cross-cultural studies relying on the definition of volunteering as activities under the auspices of civil society organisations (CSOs) misinterpret the meanings attributed to volunteering and lead to underestimation of volunteering rates in non-Western societies. Addressing this lacuna, we explore how volunteering is conceived within the historical context of social and political culture in Turkiye through an interpretative phenomenological approach. 22 focus group discussions were carried out with 10 groups (CSO managers, CSO professionals, CSO volunteer coordinators, academics, public bureaucracy, local administrations, international organisations, volunteering initiatives, volunteers, people without volunteering experience) that have a high potential to provide information on volunteering in Turkiye. Our findings reveal that volunteering in Turkiye, which is associated with benevolence and mostly carried out with altruistic motivations, is seen as spontaneous activities embedded in everyday life. This historical conception, fuelled by cultural norms and values and the Islamic tradition, renders volunteering under the auspices of CSOs futile and is reinforced by the strong state tradition of Turkiye that assumes a vertical relationship between the state and civil society, based on the understanding that the state has both a transcendent power over society and a duty to protect people. The ideologically polarised structure of CSOs, whose activities are embedded in broader social visions rather than being problem-based in scope and content, under the shadow of this tradition, which functioned as the regulating variable of Turkish politics until the 1980s with periodic military coups, also backs this conception.