Double Trouble. Distinctive Nature and Future Prospects of Religious Voluntary Associations: Vincentian Voluntary Groups in Italy: An Organizational Case Study in the Historical Neo-Institutional Perspective

Vincentian volunteers are lay Catholics who engage with the most disadvantaged as an act of free will without compensation. The study reveals the double nature of Vincentian volunteering. It is a religious movement where volunteers act in the charism of fraternal love and a non-profit non-governmental third sector entity subsidiary to public policy with the mission of general interest.
It is a most typical case of modern value-driven membership-based organized volunteering, taken in a moment of acute crisis. The book explains how voluntary action and associational life form a dynamic value system that harnesses individual contributions in producing public good. It argues that prospects of organized religious volunteering depend on the adaptive capacity of the associational infrastructure to provide venues receptive to the individual quest for existential meaning. In this lies its specific nature as an actor of the transformational change in society.

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https://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:hbz:6-80069624730

ISBN
978-3-487-16411-3 (print edition Georg Olms Publishers)
978-3-8405-0282-8 (electronic version)

Paperback, ix, 402 pages