The purpose of the study is to explain the presence of voluntary labour in governmental operations through the construction of a theory about the promotive and the preventive conditions for concurrence between voluntary and municipal actions and to test the theory on a data set collected from Swedish municipalities.

Caroline Hellström (caroline.hellstrom@fek.lu.se) is a doctoral student that writes her doctoral thesis in this subject. The thesis is in its final stage, have passed the internal evaluation, and will soon be publicly presented and defended.

More information about the project can be found in our paper: "Conditions Influencing Concurrence between Voluntary and Municipal Operations"

I had a co-operative adventure with Emidia Vagnoni, making a comparison between Ferrara, an Italian municipality, and Lund, a Swedish municipality. We published a paper in Journal of Management and Governance (6:4) with the title: 'The governance of voluntary work in the public sector: Institutional differences and invariant traits'.

I have concluded my engagement in the project. It has been influential, though, in creating the idea that comparing Italy and Sweden highlights many features that otherwise would have been kept in dark. Now I am engaged in a new Italian adventure, which you can find here.