Retaining Volunteers Through Political Economic Change: Austerity, Boundary Work, and the Making of an Unpaid Workforce in Newcastle’s Parks

This article is concerned with the persistence and transformations of local authority ‘in-house’ volunteering programs—which integrate volunteers recruited in a personal capacity in the delivery of local services—during the United Kingdom’s 2010–2020 austerity period. Drawing on qualitative research in Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s parks, the article highlights a mismatch between volunteers’ expectations of what an in-house volunteering program should feel like and what an austerity-shaped one effectively offers them. It centers the concept of ‘boundary work’ in understanding the mismatch and examining why volunteers remain involved despite it. The article emphasizes boundary work’s relational nature, showing how volunteers’ continued participation rests not only on their placement of limits but also on their managers’ awareness of and commitment to those. It also highlights how managers’ dual process of boundary demarcation and boundary downplaying helps to make volunteers’ participation feel at times strictly voluntary and at others like a shared endeavor with paid workers– a fluidity which is key to ensuring volunteers’ continued involvement in a changing political economic context.