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A voluntary divide? Exploring the role of digitalisation in German rural volunteering

  • Rural communities have experienced significant changes in their social, economic and demographic structures, leading to an increased importance of volunteering. Such activities are related to traditional association structures, which seem to be declining in popularity. One of the current hopes for strengthening rural volunteering is digitalisation. This article examines the extent to which digitalisation has found its way into volunteering and how this is related to rural areas. It summarises the discourses on volunteering, rural areas and digitalisation and introduces a mixed-methods approach at the organisational level. Based on a nationwide survey and in-depth interviews with volunteers and experts, we present a digitalisation index to illustrate that digitalisation has found its way into rural volunteering, but not to the same extent everywhere. We suggest that the sparse use of distance-bridging digital tools is due to structural peculiarities of rural voluntary organisations rather than stereotypical rural backwardness.

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Metadaten
Author: Christoph ThewesORCiD, Ariane SeptORCiD, Ralph RichterORCiD
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2478/euco-2024-0004
ISSN:1803-8417
Title of the source (English):European Countryside
Document Type:Scientific journal article peer-reviewed
Language:English
Year of publication:2024
Contributing Corporation:Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) e.V.
Tag:Associations; Digitalisation; Mixed-Methods; Rural areas; Voluntary work
Volume/Year:16
Issue number:1
First Page:43
Last Page:63
Fundername (not EU):German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture
Project number (not EU):2821FE007B
Way of publication:Open Access
Faculty/Chair:Fakultät 6 Architektur, Bauingenieurwesen und Stadtplanung / FG Regionalplanung
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