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Avoiding Intimacy—An Ethnographic Study of Beneficent Boundaries in Virtual Voluntary Social Work
VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations ( IF 2.794 ) Pub Date : 2021-04-12 , DOI: 10.1007/s11266-021-00350-w
Ane Grubb 1
Affiliation  

Within the rich literature on volunteering, the topic of volunteer–user interaction and the mechanisms causing or mitigating inequality in this interaction remain understudied. Moreover, knowledge on how digitalization affects voluntary interaction is scarce. Based on a qualitative study of a Danish organization that offers virtual voluntary tutoring, this paper shows how technological and formal aspects of the organizational context may mitigate the risk of volunteers engaging in paternalistic, intimacy-seeking behaviour. First, reliance on information and communications technology (ICT) and managerial logics sustains a bounded form of interaction in which solving a problem is the focal point, while access to personal background information is limited. Second, the organizational design suspends sociability as a criterion for differential treatment of users. Third, anonymous mediated interaction enables temporal and audio–visual asymmetry, allowing users to perform ‘digitally sustained impression management’.



中文翻译:

避免亲密——虚拟志愿社会工作中有益边界的民族志研究

在关于志愿服务的丰富文献中,志愿者与用户互动的主题以及在这种互动中导致或减轻不平等的机制仍未得到充分研究。此外,关于数字化如何影响自愿互动的知识很少。基于对提供虚拟志愿辅导的丹麦组织的定性研究,本文展示了组织环境的技术和形式方面如何降低志愿者从事家长式、寻求亲密行为的风险。首先,对信息和通信技术(ICT)和管理逻辑的依赖维持了一种有限的互动形式,其中解决问题是焦点,而对个人背景信息的访问是有限的。第二,组织设计将社交性作为区别对待用户的标准。第三,匿名中介交互实现了时间和视听不对称,允许用户执行“数字化持续印象管理”。

更新日期:2021-04-13
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