A Voluntary Divide? Exploring the Role of Digitalisation in German Rural Volunteering

Christoph Thewes, Sept Ariane () and Richter Ralph ()
Additional contact information
Sept Ariane: Professor at Munich University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Richter Ralph: Research Associate at Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Erkner bei Berlin, Germany

European Countryside, 2024, vol. 16, issue 1, 43-63

Abstract: Rural communities have experienced significant changes in their social, economic and demographic structures, leading to an increased importance of volunteering. Such activities are related to traditional association structures, which seem to be declining in popularity. One of the current hopes for strengthening rural volunteering is digitalisation. This article examines the extent to which digitalisation has found its way into volunteering and how this is related to rural areas. It summarises the discourses on volunteering, rural areas and digitalisation and introduces a mixed-methods approach at the organisational level. Based on a nationwide survey and in-depth interviews with volunteers and experts, we present a digitalisation index to illustrate that digitalisation has found its way into rural volunteering, but not to the same extent everywhere. We suggest that the sparse use of distance-bridging digital tools is due to the structural peculiarities of rural voluntary organisations rather than stereotypical rural backwardness.

Keywords: Digitalisation; Voluntary work; Rural areas; Mixed-Methods; Associations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2478/euco-2024-0004 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vrs:eurcou:v:16:y:2024:i:1:p:43-63:n:4

DOI: 10.2478/euco-2024-0004

Access Statistics for this article

European Countryside is currently edited by Milada Šťastná

More articles in European Countryside from Sciendo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().