ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of keywords covered in the subsequent chapters of the book. This book is designed as testament to growing academic and practitioner interest in understanding event volunteers, their contribution, the roles that they play and the motives that drive them to commit to unpaid and unloved work on behalf of major and small-scale events. Consciously, it does not address event volunteering in parts of the world where this phenomenon has limited tradition or where its cultural origins are significantly different from that of the majority of contributions here. The purpose of this opening chapter is to provide an introduction to event volunteering by first discussing the concept of volunteering. In the book and in event volunteering literature more generally, the focus is on formal volunteering done through an event organisation. Volunteering is a multi-dimensional concept; defining volunteering is complex and there is no consensus on what the term means.
