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This article aims to explore the concept of amateurism as a form of critique and addition to the concepts of professionalism, professional work and education.

This is a theoretically driven article based upon a review of the historical and sociological literature on amateur–professional relations in various work contexts.

While amateurism is usually conceived pejoratively, the notion of doing something “for the love of it”, even if one is not formally qualified, opens up the possibilities for conceiving new forms of work, worker and sets of working relationships based upon different conceptions of expertise. Drawing upon historical and contemporary studies of the contribution of amateurism to professional work, and exploring the role of digital technologies in enabling amateurs to contribute to forms of professional practice, the article explores some of the challenges posed for work and learning, and suggests some lines of research to be explored.

There has been little to no consideration of amateurism as a positive contribution to considerations of professional work, nor exploration of the expertise and learning of amateurs.

Purpose – To analyze the emergence of new organizational forms in the Danish welfare sector.

Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on Niklas Luhmann and Gunther Teubner, the research analyzes governmental documents, policy programs, action plans, and strategic documents.

Findings – A partnering structure has emerged with a new politics of voluntarism, complex forms of integration and new imaginary distinctions between voluntariness and public care. This can usefully be conceptualized as aspects of the stabilization of a “third-order system.” The research identified a number of different managerial strategies for involvement in the system.

Practical and social implications – Social welfare has become a mix of public and civil society values and norms, and extensive resources have been invested from both governmental and nongovernmental sides to build up shared competences for the new forms of partnering-based organization. However, to act according to the new principles of partnering, at the strategic and managerial level, the voluntary organizations have to behave in a schizophrenic manner – as both individual organizations and cooperational partners within the system.

Research implications – The concept of “third-order system” is especially useful in analyzing mixed forms of management in the welfare sector.

Originality – Different forms of radical organizational analysis are combined to develop a notion of “third-order system” in the welfare sector.

The overall objective of this research was to elucidate the ecosystem of women’s health social enterprises (WHSEs) based in the United States. The Aim I was to conduct a secondary data analysis of a random national sample of non-profit WHSEs based in the United States regarding their characteristics and areas of intervention. Aim II was to conduct a qualitative assessment of a sample of WHSEs based in the United States regarding their perspectives on the ecosystem of WHSEs. Aim I utilized the GuideStar database and assessed enterprise size, geographic location, financial distress, health intervention area, and health activity category using descriptive statistics, statistical tests, and multivariable regression analysis via SPSS. Aim II utilized in-depth interviewing and grounded theory analysis via MAXQDA 2018 to identify novel themes and core categories while using an established framework for mapping social enterprise ecosystems as a scaffold.

Aim I findings suggest that WHSE activity is more predominant in the south region of the United States but not geographically concentrated around cities previously identified as social enterprise hubs. WHSEs take a comprehensive approach to women’s health, often simultaneously focusing on multiple areas of health interventions. Although most WHSEs demonstrate a risk for financial distress, very few exhibited severe risk. Risk for financial distress was not significantly associated with any of the measured enterprise characteristics. Aim II generated four core categories of findings that describe the ecosystem of WHSE: (1) comprehensive, community-based, and culturally adaptive care; (2) interdependent innovation in systems, finances, and communication; (3) interdisciplinary, cross-enterprise collaboration; and (4) women’s health as the foundation for family and population health. These findings are consistent with the three-failures theory for non-profit organizations, particularly that WHSEs address government failure by focusing on the unmet women’s health needs of the underserved populations (in contrast to the supply of services supported by the median voter) and address the market failure of over exclusion through strategies such as cross-subsidization and price discrimination. While WHSEs operate with levels of financial risk and are subject to the voluntary sector failure of philanthropic insufficiency, the data also show that they act to remediate other threats of voluntary failure.

Aim I findings highlight the importance of understanding financial performance of WHSEs. Also, lack of significant associations between our assessed enterprise characteristics and their financial risk suggests need for additional research to identify factors that influence financial performance of WHSE. Aim II findings show that WHSEs are currently engaged in complex care coordination and comprehensive biopsychosocial care for women and their families, suggesting that these enterprises may serve as a model for improving women’s health and health care. The community-oriented and interdisciplinary nature of WHSE as highlighted by our study may also serve as a unique approach for research and education purposes. Additional research on the ecosystem of WHSE is needed in order to better inform generalizability of our findings and to elucidate how WHSE interventions may be integrated into policies and practices to improve women’s health.

This paper reports findings from a research project about human information behaviour in the context of serious leisure. Various forms of information activities in this context have been identified and categorised to depict common patterns of information seeking, sharing, using and producing.

The project adopted a qualitative approach in an interpretive paradigm using a thematic analysis method. Data-collection technique was semi-structured interview and 20 volunteers were recruited via a maximum variation sampling strategy. The collected data was transcribed and thematically analysed to identify the main concepts and categories.

The participants have been experiencing six qualities of serious leisure during their long-term engagement with their hobbies or voluntary jobs and their experiences can be fully mapped onto the serious leisure perspective. The findings also confirmed serious leisure is a unique context in terms of the diversity of information activities embedded into a wide range of individual and collective actions in this context. Information seeking and sharing in serious leisure is not only a source of personal satisfaction for the participants, it also can provide them with a sense of purpose in a meaningful journey towards self-actualization and social inclusion.

The generalisability of the findings needs to be examined in wider populations. Nonetheless, the existing findings can be useful for follow-up research in the area.

This study will be useful in both policy and practice levels. In the policy level, it will be beneficial for cultural policy makers to gain a better understanding about the nature of leisure activities. In the practice level, it will be helpful for serious leisure participants to understand the value of information seeking and sharing in their leisure endeavours. Also, information professionals can use it to enhance the quality of their services for the serious leisure participants who are usually among devoted patrons of libraries, museums, archives and galleries.

Learning about serious leisure can provide new insights on people preferences in terms of choosing different entertaining and recreational pursuits – such as indoor and outdoor hobbies – in their free time.

The informational aspects of serious leisure is an emerging and evolving ground of research. This paper provides empirical evidence on this topic from a specific context in the regional areas in Australia.

In this study, we analyze sport as a cultural product of a particular place. We use the concept of “tradition” to highlight the collective (as opposed to individual) aspects of sport, emphasizing the importance of temporality, emergence, and novelty in social processes. We conducted a case study of internationally successful Icelandic men’s team handball that provides an interesting topic in this respect. Our findings challenge decades of research on sport that has stressed innate talent, individual qualities or physiological processes rather than the sociocultural processes. They support the interactionist approach to culture showing how local culture, rooted in specific interaction settings, influences the formation and development of a successful sport tradition. It is the way that cultural elements interact and combine in various networks that is crucial for national variations in playing sport. The social processes involved are best captured by Mead’s concepts of emergence, novelty, and the principle of sociality. These concepts help us to explain how unique national styles of playing sports derive from general cultural and social mechanism that interact to produce emergent and novel national variations. Our findings also support and extend earlier work on craftsmanship indicating that crafts-work, which is a part of an organized community resembling the old “workshop,” explains in part how innovations originate in sport-specific and other local networks. These theories offer a sociological extension of pragmatic theories of learning, emphasizing the group in the tradition of Mead.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the understanding of “the” accounting entity, demonstrating how it is a contestable socio-political construction informed by a nexus of market, state and community actors.

A case study method is utilised to follow debate relating to Swedish football clubs’ responsibility for the payment/non-payment of policing costs between 1999 and 2014. The case study uses documentary and interview data, focusing on one of the high-risk Stockholm clubs.

The paper makes four main contributions: first, demonstrating how the accounting entity is a changeable and contestable construction; second, outlining how distinctions informing contests about the accounting arena are materialised through accounting calculations and other devices; third, showing the importance of community in a coordinated sense in mediating accounting practices; and fourth, contributing to the literature on accounting and sport, highlighting the importance of state actors in this arena.

This research draws on original empirical data providing unique insights into debates regarding the responsibility for the payment of police costs in the context of sports-related violence. The authors show the importance of characterising accounting for sporting organisations as a shifting and contestable nexus of market, state and community actors.

This chapter provides a useful background to the development of voluntary social work in Denmark that echoes the experience of other European countries over the last 20 years. It documents the shift from periphery to centre stage of voluntary and community organisations in the provision of social care and welfare services. This has meant new roles for volunteer-led social work organisations and social enterprises in providing services directly and in supplementing existing public sector services. The appreciation and centrality of the sector was marked with the Charter of Co-operation between the voluntary sector and government (similar to the Accord in Canada and the Compact in the United Kingdom) followed by the development of infrastructure organisations, joint committees and policy forums and calls for what la Cour and Hø´jlund describe as ‘more integrated forms of cooperation between the voluntary sector and the public sector’ (pp. 87–111, final paragraph).

Examines the huge voluntary sector contribution and shows that vast numbers of the population involve themselves in voluntary work at some time or another. Estimates that the value of their contributions could be as high as £40 billion. This huge sum is generated by dedicated people who nevertheless are for the most part not managed or badly managed, are a constantly shifting group and are not subject to the normal disciplines of business. Sets out how human resource management, as adopted by industry, can be adapted sensitively for the volunteer work‐force, despite the fact that normal levels of management ‐ control and direction ‐ are either unusable or so weak that they can be accepted or ignored, according to mood and conditions.

Looks at the development of the voluntary sector into a semi‐professional area undertaking more work which was previously seen as the State’s responsibility. Considers the amount of trust invested in these charities and the damage that new fundraising techniques may inflict. Outlines the recent political influences on society and the individual together with the resulting attitudes to charity. Briefly outlines the local and global perspectives including mass media communication.