Managing a free labor: Ethnography of volunteers in an NGO

As volunteer organizations in the non-governmental sector increasingly find themselves under pressure of market principles, interest is growing in utilizing professional human resource management practices for volunteer management. These, however, are not readily transferable from the paid context, as adjustments have to be made both with regards to the volunteer nature of the work and the context of the specific organization. One such organization is the Slovak Debate Association. This work combines a literature review on motivational theories and volunteer management with an autoethnographical account of the organization to design a semi-structured interview through which the volunteers’ narrative of working for it is collected. Data from these interviews is analysed and used together with the literature review and autoethnographical data to create tailored recommendations for utilizing human resource management practices in the specific context of the organization.