Human association for the sake of human association: Sociability as a core value in volunteer social care

Many forms of volunteer social care take place in face-to-face interaction between volunteers and the people they are there to help (e.g. Big Brothers Big Sisters, voluntary visitors, Red Cross Friend to name a few). Although these interactions are initiated with the express purpose of helping people who are in need of help, existing research shows how developing a relationship that is, to lesser degree, defined by this helper/helped distinction, can in the end provide better social care.

The paper suggests that volunteer social care has the potential of being human association for the sake of human association; of being an interpersonal relationship with no external purpose outside that of associating with each other. This is expressed through the concept of sociability (Simmel, 1911/1949) Sociability is the inherent satisfaction coming from being associated with others, and the human impulse which drives us towards this form of interpersonal relationship. It can be found in contacts and encounters, actually initiated and driven by another purpose, which brings the parties together, but which at the same time makes it possible for these parties to simply enjoy being associated with each other. In a narrower sense, sociability is communication and human association done solely for the sake of communicating and associating – it is a way of being together, just for the sake of being together.


The paper applies this concept to social care and asks what it means to associate with each other for the sake of associating with each other in that particular context? How can this take place? What would characterise this form of communication and building of interpersonal relationships, and how can it be beneficial in a social care setting. The aim is to contribute with a communicative and relational perspective on volunteer social work and to literature on co-production of person-oriented social work (La Cour & Højlund, 2008, s. 44) that focus on public goods or outcomes as “less quantifiable, personal aspects, such as befriending, building relationships and broader quality of life issues” (Needham & Carr, 2009, s. 12).


According to existing research (La Cour, 2017, 2019; La Cour & Højlund, 2008; Onyx, 2013; Sandberg & Elliott, 2019) some forms of volunteer social care are most efficient in reaching the missions of the NPOs organising this care, if the volunteers stop seeing themselves as representatives of the NPO and instead enter into interpersonal relationships with the clients of the NPO that develop on its own conditions. These are relationships, not guided by rules, formal roles, top-down management or training offered and defined by the NPO. A key point from the review is that what distinguishes volunteer social care from professional social care, is that voluntary social care, under certain circumstances, can take place in interpersonal relationships that are based on, and conditioned by, the face-to-face interaction between volunteer and client; it is a relationship carried by the inherent value of being together – and it is this relationship, which is conceptualised as sociability.

The paper is based on an interpersonal organisational communication (IPOC) perspective (Alrø & Frimann, 2008; Dahl, 2008) on volunteer social care, and conceptualises sociability as a form of phatic communication: “A type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words.” and where: “each utterance is an act serving the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker by a tie of some social sentiment or other” (Malinowski, 1923/1994, pp. 9-10).