Introduction

Starting from the mid-1990s, the literature about volunteering has significantly focused on the transformations of volunteering in contemporary (Western) societies. Second modernity theories (Beck, Reference Beck1992, Reference Beck, Beck, Giddens and Lash1994, Reference Beck2000; Giddens, Reference Giddens1991) have largely driven scholars’ and practitioners’ interpretations. This theoretical frame has helped to address the transition toward the so-called new forms of voluntary action, but debate in this regard still seems uncompleted. Scholars and practitioners have often welcomed the idea, similarly to other realms (Chadwick, Reference Chadwick and Bevir2007), that voluntary action in contemporary (Western) societies has been progressively destructured and disintermediated, i.e., released from the cognitive, regulative and organizational intermediations between volunteers and recipients that structured the field of volunteering in first modernity. The trends toward modernization and individualization of volunteering have been reduced “to a process of dis-embedding, without acknowledging a parallel process of re-embedding” (Hustinx, Reference Hustinx2010: 166).

Although the recent literature has begun to fill this gap (Haski-Leventhal et al., Reference Haski-Leventhal, Meijs and Hustinx2010; Hustinx, Reference Hustinx2010), the re-embedding processes of volunteering within second modernity still need to be better “differentiated,” “delineated” and “empirically investigated” (Hustinx, Reference Hustinx2010: 175). This paper intends to do this in theoretical and empirical terms by focusing on the reintermediation processes of contemporary voluntary action in Italy. On the whole, it enables us to better grasp the plural nature of contemporary volunteering, its renewed intermediations and emerging tensions. Beyond the national case, the approach followed here helps to better understand the strategies of collective actors in the field of volunteering and the assemblies between global trends and local configurations.

In the first section, after having briefly recalled second modernity-inspired interpretations on the transformations of voluntary action, I introduce my research approach. Against dichotomic, abstract and implicit visions of change, I argue that different types of volunteering “traditions” (active membership, direct, program and organize-it-yourselves) coexist in contemporary (Western) societies and that they are generated and coevolve in path-dependent ways through the interplay of diverse strategic actors. In the second section, this approach is used to address the reintermediation processes within the Italian volunteering field in the 2000s. Although the analysis is exploratory, it can help to understand the coevolutions of the four traditions and identify a typical restructuration model based on professional agencies coming from the membership tradition.

The Changing Intermediations of Volunteering in Contemporary Societies: A Situated Approach

According to second modernity theories, contemporary volunteering has progressively abandoned the twentieth-century styles of involvement. The why (motivations to volunteer) and how (forms of volunteering) would appear to have changed conjointly (Hustinx, Reference Hustinx2010; Hustinx et al., Reference Hustinx2010a, Reference Hustinxb). Sacrifice, altruism and sociopolitical engagement may no longer be the central cognitive frames to explain why people act for free, whereas exploring, entertaining, strengthening employability and self-development emerge as typical motivations (Beck, Reference Beck, Beck, Giddens and Lash1994; Handy et al., Reference Handy2010). Second modernity volunteering has been shown to be more “reflexive”—that is “driven by individual preferences and shaped through occasional involvement in a diversity of settings” (Hustinx & Lammertyn, Reference Hustinx and Lammertyn2003: 168). The ways through which volunteers provide their own activity are changing toward occasionality, flexibility and temporality. “Episodic volunteering” (Wilson, Reference Wilson2012) is increasingly relevant in the world: that of “individuals who engage in one-time or short-term volunteer opportunities” (Cnaan & Handy, Reference Cnaan and Handy2005: 30). Contrary to the long-term commitment to membership-based associations in first modernity, the “new forms of voluntary action” are mainly carried out through a weak and limited belonging to an organization or without any form of organizational membership, “during special times of the year, or at one-time events, often in the form of self-contained and time-specific projects” (Meijs & Brudney, Reference Meijs and Brudney2007: 69). All this relieves volunteers from moral obligations and organizational structures, but it can also undermine conventional notions of gratuitousness. This shift risks contrasting with the civic action frame of volunteering (Eliasoph, Reference Eliasoph2009). Individualization and reflexivity may, however, shape the self-organization of engagement opportunities (Norris, Reference Norris2002).

Although these changes appear to dramatically challenge notion, practice and the possible impacts of voluntary action as we knew it in the twentieth century, a radical disorganization, disintermediation and deinstitutionalization of the voluntary action seems unrealistic. Contemporary voluntary action is more likely to be involved in relevant reintermediation processes. As Hustinx (Reference Hustinx2010: 174) wrote,

In this perspective, institutions and organizations are brought back into the debate and the focus is shifted to the changing intermediations of volunteering in late modern societies. Two major paths appear to have emerged. In the first (primary restructuration), voluntary associations are still center stage. They design and adopt “new organizational strategies to better cope with [the] biographical changes of the individual volunteers (…) [and to] offer more attractive and flexible volunteering menus” (Hustinx, Reference Hustinx2010: 170–174). The second path (secondary restructuration) mainly occurs outside the membership tradition and it is shaped by “third parties” (e.g., schools, governments, corporations) (Hustinx, Reference Hustinx2010: 173; Haski-Leventhal et al., Reference Haski-Leventhal, Meijs and Hustinx2010). Often in collaboration with voluntary associations, they provide people with a differentiated offer of short-term and highly individualized volunteering programs, whose objectives (e.g., boosting social (re-)integration, employability and active citizenship) are shaped by each third party’s specific mission. These volunteering opportunities are designed and offered top-down, as “plug-in” activities that “mimic classic voluntary participation” (Hustinx, Reference Hustinx2010: 174), or as institutionally enforced mandatory activities.

The renewed intermediations can foster and enhance volunteering in second modernity, but they also pose several challenges. The growing role of communication, marketing and management activities may be to the detriment of other activities in associations. Volunteering seems to result more from “recruitment efforts by the organization than from the intrinsic motivations of the volunteers” (Hustinx, Reference Hustinx2010: 175). Third parties’ actions question the standard definition and conventional public understanding of volunteering as free will and they prompt issues regarding the instrumental uses of episodic volunteering (De Waele & Hustinx, Reference De Waele and Hustinx2019).

Nevertheless, research on the reintermediation processes of volunteering still seems to be unaccomplished. Whereas in-depth and critical investigations of single initiatives exist (eg. De Waele & Hustinx, Reference De Waele and Hustinx2019; Shachar, Reference Shacar2014), studies on the reintermediation paths of volunteering at country level are somewhat scarce. There is a lack of knowledge as to how these processes actually work in different contexts, beyond general typologies. Moreover, very little is known about some regions (e.g., Southern Europe).

As a contribution to further exploring, a dynamic and situated two-step approach is adopted here. The first step consists in giving volunteering a renewed sociological consideration. Volunteering is here intended as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon encompassing cognitive, regulative, agential and practice-related elements. This marks some distance from the conventional vocabulary of “new forms of voluntary action” where the “new” is implicitly and irreducibly counterposed to the “old” and the emphasis on the individual action risks obscuring institutional and organizational intermediations. The transformations of volunteering are here approached by integrating the reference to the (new) forms of voluntary action within the more comprehensive concept of “volunteering tradition,” which combines the different aspects of the “cross-section between individual and institutional forces” (Hustinx, Reference Hustinx2010: 169). For “volunteering tradition,” I hereby mean a somehow coherent, multilayer and dynamic assembly of recognized beliefs, meanings and logics (cognitive components), formal regulations (regulative components), typical networks (social components), legitimized actors (agential components) and types of practice (practice-related components). This assembly becomes consolidated (institutionalized) within a context, under some conditions, in the medium–long term.Footnote ¹ On the one hand, this definition owes much to the new institutionalist literature that highlighted the importance of cognitive features and regulative components for order and change (Béland, Reference Béland2005; Campbell, Reference Campbell2002; Pierson, Reference Pierson2001) and considered the context as distributing appropriateness and legimitimation entitlements among agents (March & Olsen, Reference March and Olsen1989; Hay, Reference Hay2002). On the other hand, the definition provides individual and collective agency with a significant—although bounded—room (Hay, Reference Hay2002). It releaves the voluntary action from pre-defined actors (such as voluntary associations), and it conceives “volunteering tradition” as the result of an institutionalizing process (Berger & Luckmann, Reference Berger and Luckmann1966) situated in time and space.

The recent literature seems to account for four ideal–typical volunteering traditions in contemporary societies.Footnote ² Table 1 summarizes the key components of this starting typology. The active membership tradition has been considered typical of first modern Europe, namely of Scandinavian countries (Meijs & Hoogstad, Reference Meijs and Hoogstad2001; Dekker, Reference Dekker2018; Enjolras & Strømsens, Reference Enjolras, Strømsnes, Enjolras and Strømsnes2018). Here, volunteers belong to formally (pre-)established nonprofit organizations whose basic characteristics are regulated by legislation; core values and mission are shaped by founders; strategies, activities and instruments are defined by current members. Far from being a solipsistic activity, individual voluntary action is considered a way to reach the organization’s objectives. Organizations often have a multilevel structure and are intended as “mediating institutions between individual member and the national political system” (Enjolras & Strømsnes, Reference Enjolras, Strømsnes, Enjolras and Strømsnes2018: 2).

Table 1 Volunteering traditions, a starting typology

Volunteering traditions	Constitutive components
	Cognitive	Regulative	Social	Agential	Practice-related
Active membership	Solidarity and gratuitousness	Present. Universal by law, particular by founders and members	Complex vertical networks (from voluntary action to political system)	Pre-established nonprofit organizations, especially voluntary associations	Volunteering of the members
Direct	Moral and cultural obligations, reciprocity	Absent	Affinity networks	Single individuals	Informal help
Programs	Immediate (non-economic) return	Present. Particular and detailed by programs leaders	Complex horizontal or multiscalar networks	Third parties (schools, corporations, etc.); voluntary associations (marginal)	Short-term volunteering
Organize-it- yourselves	Self-organization for own and collective interest	Absent, sometimes tackled as a political issue	Emerging and temporary networks	Groups of citizens	Direct social action

By contrast, in the direct volunteering tradition people act without any organizational intermediation (Einolf et al., Reference Einolf, Smith, Stebbins and Grotz2016). Volunteers’ actions are neither regulated by law or included in governance processes, nor coordinated, but they are not necessarily extemporaneous. Especially in Global South countries, low-status individuals often provide informal help within community circles (neighborhood, kinship, etc.) as a way to respond to moral and cultural obligations and/or as a reciprocity strategy allowing material subsistence (e.g., Andean “ayni” (Appe et al., Reference Appe, Butcher and Einolf2017) or informal assistance to HIV/AIDS victims in Africa (Fowler & Mati, Reference Fowler and Mati2019)). In Western societies, direct volunteering could, however, be interpreted in second modern terms, as an expression of individualistic, free, occasional involvement and a distrust in structured associations (Fonović et al., Reference Fonovic, Guidi and Cappadozzi2018). The lack of formal organization and the reciprocity pattern complicate the consideration of this kind of practice as volunteering, especially in some areas of the world (Guidi et al., Reference Guidi, Guidi, Fonović and Cappadozzi2021).

Growing attention has been dedicated to the program-based volunteering tradition. Considered prevalent in North America (Meijs & Hoogstad, Reference Meijs and Hoogstad2001), increasing in Scandinavian countries (Grubb & Henriksen, Reference Grubb and Henriksen2019) and facilitated by ICT technologies (Trautwein et al., Reference Trautwein2020), it is characterized by episodic, short-term and spatially circumscribed volunteering experiences provided by different organizations for the general public or specific targets. This voluntary action is usually top-down and highly regulated by the organizer. Short-term volunteering experiences are often promoted, designed and publicly communicated by an organization (often a “third party”) and developed in another one (e.g., a membership-based association), or in an event (e.g., local festivals, World Expo, Good Deeds Day, etc.). These provide the relational context for the experience (Cnaan & Handy, Reference Cnaan and Handy2005; Meijs & Brudney, Reference Meijs and Brudney2007). Thus, program-based volunteering is strictly organized. It implies the activation of many organizations that design and manage the programs (Maas et al., Reference Maas2021). It is individualized in so far as the voluntary action does not imply that the volunteer has an organizational membership, a value identification or a future involvement. The relevance of incentives supporting individual activation within this tradition sometimes undermines the definition of volunteering as a free action (De Waele & Hustinx, Reference De Waele and Hustinx2019; Tõnurist & Surva, Reference Tõnurist and Surva2017).

The final volunteering tradition can be named Organize-It-Yourselves. It includes those citizens’ voluntary actions directly faced with an emergent problem which is not tackled enough by institutions, market or existing civil society organizations. Voluntary action is here highly spontaneous and informal, but not disorganized. People coordinate themselves to achieve a tangible result through soft and temporary instruments which often do not imply (and sometimes explicitly reject) any formal membership. Rooted in the history of bottom-up citizens’ initiatives, this multifaceted volunteering tradition recurs in multiple contexts, from the USA communities in the 1990s (Wuthnow, Reference Wuthnow1994) to the recent crises in Europe (Kousis, Reference Kousis2017; Simsa et al., Reference Simsa2019). People involved in the self-organized initiatives often aspire to contribute to solving a problem they personally face, but the activity (or its results) can also be enjoyed by others. Whereas many initiatives are limited to the achievement of circumscribed results in given and undisputed settings, some may prefigure new ways of managing the commons (see below for Italian examples). People here may not name their own practice as volunteering, since they often act for partly self-interested or political reasons. Clear are here the connections to civic action and social movements (Evers & van Essen, Reference Evers and von Essen2019; della Porta, Reference Della Porta2020).

Once notions and ideal types of “volunteering tradition” have been introduced as starting references, the second step consists in tackling (re)intermediations of volunteering in contextual and dynamic terms. Beyond general typologies, a context-specific analysis identifies the peculiar characteristics of the volunteering traditions and enables us to grasp how each one possibly emerges, spreads, evolves and declines in relation to the others over time. Rather than considering the “volunteering traditions” separately and associating each with a country or a region, in times of complexity different volunteering traditions are taken as coexisting and coevolving within the same context, although one or another can be considered mainstream in a context. From this perspective, the attention is focused on the changes and continuities in the field of volunteering. On the wave of the modernization-induced transformations, this field is expected to become more plural and complex with both a growing number of concomitant traditions and changes within the established traditions. Whether and how this actually happens is a matter of empirical investigation context by context.

To conduct it, a conception of how changes happen is necessary. One of the most significant weaknesses in the debate on the “new forms of voluntary action” seems to be the adoption of mechanistic and culture-driven implicit assumptions about change. Although it seems clear that epochal cultural shifts have pushed the voluntary action of (Western) societies toward more individualized and reflexive styles, the processes through which a volunteering tradition transforms and adapts and/or a new one emerges in a context are unclear.

The concepts of “path dependency” and “strategic field” can help to fill this gap. Volunteering traditions are expected to be generated and coevolve mainly through path-dependent processes. Second modernity trends exert a global influence on Western societies, but local contexts matter. Coherently with the “path dependency” assumption (March & Olsen, Reference March and Olsen1989, Mahoney, Reference Mahoney2000; Mahoney & Schensul, Reference Mahoney, Schensul, Goodin and Tilly2006), the peculiar characteristics of volunteering in a context, institutionally stratified in time, are presumed to “filter” global pressures for change and condition the strategies of actors.

This does not imply assuming change is impossible. Volunteering traditions are loose, malleable and manipulable. Following Bevir, Rhodes, Weller (Reference Bevir, Rhodes and Weller2003: 14–17), they are “a starting point, not a destination” and change as agents “make a series of variations to them in response to any number of specific dilemmas.” From this perspective, innovation does not necessarily need innovators from outside because also incumbent actors enjoy significant room to innovate from the inside. Coherently with the literature (Campbell, Reference Campbell2004, Reference Campbell, Morgan, Campbell, Crouch, Pedersen and Whitley2010; Clarke et al., Reference Clarke, Bainton, Lendvai and Stubbs2015; Freeman, Reference Freeman2007), generating and regenerating a tradition in a path-dependent way means here mainly assembling different components coming from within and outside of the volunteering field. Incumbent actors can, for example, insert new components into the existing tradition without betraying it, incrementally or surreptitiously alter it or eventually spin a new tradition off the consolidated one and keep control over both. Conversely, new actors can pick out some components of different existing traditions in order to assemble a new one or bring in some components from outside and tackle an existing tradition with these.

Against the risk of hypostasizing the interpretations, the changes and continuities are conceived as resulting from the reiterated and bounded interaction between different actors within a context. More specifically, volunteering traditions are expected to exist and change through the interplays of strategic actors engaging within a structured and complex field. Fligstein’s works help in this regard. In his terms, a field can be understood as

A field is populated by strategic actors who work “to maintain their position” (Fligstein, Reference Fligstein2013: 41). Sometimes it means that they are inertial or that they contrast innovation. Sometimes promoting change or capturing and governing renewal trends can be more effective.

In settled times—when the field is structured—actions are oriented to reproduce a given order of clear rules, well-defined roles and taken-for-granted meanings supporting conventional actions. Conversely, in unsettled times—when the field is emerging—actors can become “institutional entrepreneurs” (DiMaggio, Reference DiMaggio and Zucker1988), working to build groups’ interests and identities as well as new meanings and rules (Fligstein & McAdam, Reference Fligstein and McAdam2012: 291–292). To be successful, institutional entrepreneurs must have “social skills,” that is they must be able “to motivate cooperation in other actors” (Fligstein, Reference Fligstein1997: 398) by taking other actors’ interests into account, meet them (Fligstein, Reference Fligstein1997: 398–401) and “mobilize sufficient support for a certain shared worldview” (Fligstein & McAdam, Reference Fligstein and McAdam2012: 292).Footnote ³

According to Fligstein and McAdam (Reference Fligstein and McAdam2012), the field can have three states: (1) emerging; (2) organized and stable; and (3) organized and unstable. Emerging fields are particularly those where rules do not yet exist, but actors increasingly collaborate on the basis of new and interdependent interests. Since there are few restrictions to action, here innovation is more likely and socially skilled actors “can make an enormous difference” (Fligstein & McAdam, Reference Fligstein and McAdam2012: 299). Existing fields can have a boosting influence on those that are emerging because the former can provide “the market” for new ends to emerge (Fligstein & McAdam, Reference Fligstein and McAdam2012: 298). A field can be made unstable by the invasion of those outside organizations which “are not bound by the convention of the field and are free to bring new definitions of the situation and new forms of action to the fray” (Fligstein and McAdam, Reference Fligstein and McAdam2012: 301).

To recap, my approach to the study of volunteering reintermediation processes consists in

1. (a) (Re)considering volunteering in social and institutional terms through the notion of “volunteering tradition” and the reference to four ideal–typical traditions;

2. (b) Assuming that different “volunteering traditions” may coexist in the same context and that second modernity changes may push national fields of volunteering to become more complex and plural;

3. (c) Focusing attention on the peculiar characteristics and coevolutions of the different “traditions” in the field of one or more national/regional contexts;

4. (d) Assuming that these coevolutions are significantly path-dependent and that they result from the reiterated, complex, bounded strategic interactions of actors in the field.

Italian Volunteering Beyond the Membership Tradition: A Path-Dependent Restructuration

The (Emerging) Program-Oriented Volunteering Tradition

A program-oriented volunteering tradition has emerged in Italy since the late 1990s. Scholars, practitioners and the media have given specific initiatives some attention, but neither comprehensive data nor studies exist on it in Italy. As a matter of fact, there are currently so many different and dispersed volunteering programs that systematic knowledge is very difficult. I explored them by means of: (1) a national Seminar (Rome, 2017) and three local Seminars (Bologna, Ferrara, Modena, 2019) with NPOs and CSVs aimed at making examples of volunteering programs emerge; (2) content analysis of the websites of the twenty biggest national associative networks and the CSVs (November 2019); (3) systematic review of documents (2000–2020) archived in the Centro Studi, Documentazione e Ricerche of CSV Lazio, the largest Italian documentation center on volunteering.

From this analysis (see Table 2 for a synthesis), Italian volunteering programs result aligned with the literature on episodic volunteering: Here voluntary activity is short term, separated from organizational membership and ongoing engagement, and weakly shaped by civic causes or reference to social problems.

Table 2 Volunteering programs in Italy, an initial map

Program	Target	Institutional frame	Volunteering practice	Role of law	Volunteers’ incentives	Main players
						Local	National
1. National civil service (2001-)	Youth, 18–28 years old	Active labor market policies	One-year activity in NPOs or municipalities	Program’s driver	Monthly fee, future workplace, resume building	NPOs, Municipalities, CSVs, Regional administrations	National Civil Service Government Office
2. School and volunteering (early 2000-)	Secondary school students	Transition from school to work	Stage/internship in a NPO	Program’s facilitation and incentivization	Course credits, “Schoolwork alternance” fulfillment, resume building	Schools, NPOs, CSVs, local governments	Ministry of Education, CSVnet
3. Corporate volunteering (highly visible since 2011)	Large enterprise workers	Corporate social responsibility	One or more days in/for a NPO	Program’s facilitation	Worker’s reputation in the workplace	NPOs, enterprises, CSVs	Sodalitas Foundation, CERGAS Bocconi University, CSV Milan, CSVnet
4. Event volunteering (highly visible since 2015)	Mainly youth	Event-related	Service activity in an event (sometimes promoted by NPOs)	Not significant	Various material (e.g., tablet) and immaterial (e.g., “being part” of a big event, future friends)	NPOs, for-profit organizations, CSVs	CSVnet
5. Restorative and asylum seekers’ volunteering (2010-)	Sentenced people, Asylum seekers’	(Re)integration process	Work in the public interest supported by NPOs	Program’s driver	Alternative to prison, personal rehabilitation, activation	Local government agencies (Prefetture, UEPE, USSM), NPOs, CSVs	Ministries of Interior and Justice, CSVnet
6. Brokerage organizations (2011-)	Mainly youth	Flexibile and episodic engagement	Service in a NPO or event	No	Dependent on the settings	CSVs (Milan and others), Milan–Rome–Bologna Altruista	CSVnet, ItaliAltruista network

Although the heterogeneity of programs is high, some emerging intermediations appear to be relatively clear. NPO activities are the main contexts of voluntary action, but third parties (schools, corporations, institutions) structure short-term experiences in cognitive and material terms according to their own specific missions. The organizations where individuals study/work (programs 2, 3 in Table 2), those facilitating the matching between volunteering demand and supply (6) or the organizers of the events (4) seem to hegemonize the meaning-making of short-term voluntary action and establish its temporal limits. This trend is even stronger when programs (2, 5) are explicitly included in the domain of public policies aimed at increasing employability and social (re)integration.

Educating (young) people in solidarity and involving new (young) volunteers are often at the core of NPOs’ interest in programs, but these objectives are difficult to reach also because personal incentives are center stage. The voluntary action of programs is expected to produce immediate benefits for both promoters and volunteers. This return logic is initiative-dependent, according to the mission of the organization/institution, or shaped by an edonistic culture. Incentives are sometimes (1, 5) so strong that individual action may not be considered free enough for the conventional definitions of volunteering. This tension, however, exists in all the programs.

While no law regulates this tradition, sector legislation significantly matters. Legislation is important for funding (1, 5), (re)framing (1, 5), facilitating (2, 3) and incentivizing (2, 6) the programs. However, this is only partially and, except for 1 and 5, law does not address volunteers’ action and role. In this tradition what is crucial are situated regulations provided by the organizations promoting and managing the program, which usually ask volunteers to carry out precise tasks in clear spatio-temporal conditions, with little room for discussion and creativity.

While conventional membership-based organizations have so far acted in this tradition with an agenda-taking attitude, the role of CSVs appears to be different. Since the early 2000s, several local CSVs have significantly invested in volunteering programs on the basis of a “misalignment hypothesis.” According to this, a growing distance between volunteering associations and young people exists. Associations cannot bridge this gap, and CSVs can help them through volunteering programs (Bonetti & Guidi, Reference Bonetti, Guidi and Ambrosini2016). The CSVs’ role in the programs appears today very relevant and mainly consists in.

1. 1. Promoting the program (1);

2. 2. Scouting opportunities for establishing a program, supporting member associations’ design and program start-up, monitoring and disseminating results in partnership with experts and third parties (3);

3. 3. Designing, promoting (2, 4, 5) and sometimes directly funding and/or managing (2, 4) the program in collaboration with the member associations and/or third parties;

4. 4. Constituting new brokerage organizations (7), in partnership with for-profit organizations, in order to facilitate the matching between the supply of short-term volunteering opportunities and the demand.

At a national level, CSVnet has endorsed and supported CSVs’ volunteering programs, widely disseminated their initiatives and facilitated the exchange of good practices. Through these activities, CSVs and CSVnet seem able to mitigate third-party activism in volunteering programs, thus allowing NPOs to keep some (indirect) control over the programs.

Discussion and Conclusions

The exploratory analysis shows that in the last 20 years the Italian field of volunteering has become plural and “unstable” to some extent (Fligstein & McAdam, Reference Fligstein and McAdam2012), with a growing number of agencies intermediating in the demand and supply of volunteering. Four recognizable volunteering traditions now coexist in Italy, each characterized by specific agencies and processes of intermediation. While the active membership tradition still appears to be mainstream, it no longer has the “monopoly” on intermediations and it is “challenged” by other traditions, namely by the program-oriented tradition, whose new intermediations are robust and widespread. Table 3 summarizes the most relevant results.

Table 3 Current intermediations of Italian volunteering, an exploration

Tradition	Intermediation agencies	Intermediation processes	Position in the field
Active membership	NPOs, policy makers	Formal and consolidated, driven by - NPO action since the 1980s (historical legacy before) - Laws on volunteering and nonprofit since the 1990s	Mainstream, but challenged by other traditions
Direct	ISTAT, CSVs/CSVnet, policy-makers	Recent and soft, prompted by - New statistical measurement instruments implemented by ISTAT and CSVnet since 2012 - Laws on Third Sector since 2017	Marginal, but re-enacted
Program	Third parties, CSVs/CSVnet	Robust, spread, fragmented, and led by - Single third parties structuring the frame and temporal limits of volunteers’ experience - CSVs mediating the relations between third parties and NPOs where volunteers act	Emergent and challenging
Organize-it-yourselves	OIY initiatives	Limited, consisting in - Bottom–up networking - Connection to existing NPOs (Labsus, CSVnet, etc.)	Marginal

On the whole, the Italian case confirms the idea that, far from being disembedded and radically new, late modern evolutions of volunteering are supported by reintermediation processes (Hustinx, Reference Hustinx2010) and it prompts the hypothesis that these result also from complex coevolutions between the different traditions of volunteering. The active membership tradition, structured in the 1980s/early-1990s, has significantly affected subsequent evolutions of the field, especially the characteristics of the program-based tradition, although exogeneous factors (e.g., new education policy) are relevant. As feedback, once established, the program-based tradition creates tensions regarding crucial aspects of the active membership tradition (e.g., marginal role of NPOs and relevance of incentives).

Differently from the primary restructuration path illustrated by Hustinx (Reference Hustinx2010), the Italian case shows that “path dependency” mechanisms can be spurious and bring relatively new actors to the fore. Rather than voluntary associations, voluntary service centers (CSVs) and their national network (CSVnet) appear to be the key “institutional entrepreneur” (DiMaggio, Reference DiMaggio and Zucker1988, Thornton & Ocasio Reference Thornton, Ocasio, Greenwood, Oliver, Suddaby and Sahlin2008) in the coevolution of volunteering traditions. Similarly to other peak organizations (Guidi et al. Reference Guidi, Guidi, Fonović and Cappadozzi2021), such actors deserve peculiar attention in the study of the new volunteering intermediations because of their hybrid nature, “in-between” conventional NPOs and third parties. Their history (they were established by the first national law on volunteering in 1991), structure of formal competences and corporate governance (they are second and third level organizations recognized by law and formally entitled to provide organized volunteer services), their resources (they can count on permanent funds by law) and their professional competences (they employ salaried professionals) have enabled them to develop highly legitimized strategies reshaping volunteering intermediations and keeping NPOs connected to new trends. They have acted to reenact and reframe the “direct volunteering” tradition through new data and discourse, to capture and control the trend toward volunteering programs through organization, funding and discourse, to connect (some) OIY initiatives through their visibilization and partnership.

The Italian case also contributes to a better understanding of the criticalities and risks of the new intermediations of volunteering (Hustinx, Reference Hustinx2010; Haski-Leventhal et al., Reference Haski-Leventhal, Meijs and Hustinx2010). The action of CSVs and CSVnet in the program-based tradition has limited and conditioned third parties, but they also risk narrowing the room of manouvre for the NPOs being served. While CSVs and CSVnet have acted in the program-based tradition as a professional avantgarde since the 1990s, NPOs appear rather to be agenda takers and are sometimes reduced to being voluntary experience providers. The action of CSVs/CSVnet attempts to put the trend toward episodic volunteering at the service of NPOs, but risks indulging the advancement of governmentality, depoliticization and consumerism (Hustinx, Reference Hustinx2010; Eliasoph, Reference Eliasoph2009) and to alter some basic connotations of voluntary action. Considering that “black” and underpaid work is widespread and youth unemployment is high in Italy, monetary and occupational incentives to volunteer may jeopardize the gratuitousness of volunteering and its civic meanings (Overgaard, Reference Overgaard2019).

In conclusion, the Italian case contributes to developing the debate on the reintermediations of volunteering insofar as it shows the existence of an “in-between” model of restructuring, neither driven by voluntary associations nor centered on third parties (Haski-Leventhal et al., Reference Haski-Leventhal, Meijs and Hustinx2010; Hustinx, Reference Hustinx2010), but shaped by professional agencies governed by NPOs. On the basis of high levels of legitimation, resources and competences, these agencies welcome societal trends toward individualization and reflexivity and translate them into new, diversified and multifactorial organizational patterns (programs, brokerage initiatives, data sets, etc.) which are expected to serve the renewal of the NPOs. Path dependency is confirmed to be one of the major change dynamics of volunteering (Enjolras & Strømsens, Reference Enjolras, Strømsnes, Enjolras and Strømsnes2018), but in a “spurious” form, that is pivoted on new agencies emerging from the active membership tradition.

The reintermediation processes of volunteering appear, therefore, to be highly context-dependent and resulting from the interplay between collective strategic actors in a structured social arena. This can help future studies to reconsider the magnitude and dynamics of second modernity trends and to tackle continuities and changes in the reintermediation of volunteering in situated and dynamic terms, beyond just the Italian case.