ABSTRACT
This book focuses on sport volunteers – their characteristics, contributions, the settings in which they work and the issues associated with managing them. However, in order to develop a comprehensive grasp of how to work effectively with sport volunteers, a broader contextual understanding of volunteering and the third sector is necessary. This chapter provides the background to and rationale for the remainder of the book. It outlines definitional issues related to volunteering, provides a brief historical overview of volunteering and describes how research in the area of volunteering has progressed in recent years. A variety of international data is utilized to describe volunteer trends and the nature and scope of the contributions made by volunteers before briefly concluding with an introduction to the importance of volunteers in community sport.
