The Volunteer as Visitor?

This master thesis is an investigation of the motives of volunteers at non-mainstream concert venues. A main focus of this study is the idea of seeing volunteering as a form of visiting which has shown to be a useful approach in studying the motivational factors of volunteers in the cultural sector and in considering their place and role within the cultural organisation as such. Previous literature on volunteer motivation has mainly focused on volunteering in more general terms including community-based volunteering and volunteering in developing countries, while the part of the literature focusing on the cultural sector has mostly looked at volunteering in the context of museums. This paper aims at adding to this research. A functional classification scheme of volunteer motives was developed on the basis of existent literature dividing the complex of motives into six categories: education, aesthetics, recreation, escape, self-esteem enhancement, and social interaction. The research was carried out as a mixed methods case study of two selected concert venues, Worm (Rotterdam, NL) and Radar (Århus, DK). An online survey was carried out among 73 volunteers, and then followed up by semi-structured interviews with six volunteers from each venue. The results of the research have indicated that volunteers at non-mainstream concert venues are largely motivated by the same categories as frequent visitors, however, that the two can not be equated to each other. The volunteers especially differed by scoring high in the social interaction category which further seemed to be specific to the concert venue context. The respondents were reflective about why they volunteer, their motivation showed to change over time, and especially the self-esteem enhancement category turned out to be positively related to length of volunteering and level of involvement. Finally, the profile of the volunteers showed to differ in terms of age, gender, and occupation besides volunteering, when compared to that of volunteers in museums, which further gives purpose to looking at volunteers at concert venues separately when studying the motives of volunteers in the cultural sector.