Institutional work by migrant women leaders in precarious spaces of volunteering in Melbourne, Australia

Abstract

This paper analyses the role that migrant women leaders play in sustaining precarious spaces of community-led volunteering. The voluntary sector has been theorised as an interstitial yet connective space that nourishes unmet needs of migrant women in the context of familial demands, labour market marginalisation, and a diminishing welfare state. While state-funded initiatives are often intended to address these gendered asymmetries, less is known about the dynamics of precarious spaces of community-led volunteering, and in particular about the leaders who appreciate and navigate the complexities of these spaces. Grounding our analysis in feminist geographies of volunteering literature, and employing the concept of institutional work, we interview multiple stakeholders in a network of Local Migrant Women’s Clubs (LMWCs) in Australia. In this precarious space, migrant women leaders are required to bridge contradictory logics of migrant women’s vulnerabilities and escalating administrative expectations under poorly-resourced conditions. Our analysis advances institutional work as a productive frame to trace linkages between divergent institutional agendas at the macro-level, and the distributed agency and invisible labour of migrant women leaders at the level of lived experience. Overall, the lens of institutional work foregrounds the tacit and intensive investments required on the part of poorly resourced migrant women leaders to maintain required circulations of care in their local communities.

Keywords:

• Australia
• feminist geography
• geographies of volunteering
• institutional work
• migrant women leaders
• volunteer organisations

Acknowledgement

We gratefully acknowledge the participants for sharing their important stories. We also appreciate the financial support provided by Monash Business School in funding this interdisciplinary research project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yelena Tsarenko

Yelena Tsarenko is a Professor of Marketing at Monash Business School. Her primary research interests are in consumer psychology and services marketing. Yelena has published her research in journals such as Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Business Research and European Journal of Marketing, as well as other journals.

Angela Gracia B. Cruz

Angela Gracia B. Cruz is a Senior Lecturer of Marketing at Monash University. Her research is focussed on theories of consumption, marketing communication and branding at the boundaries of markets – referring to liminal market spaces where complexities, ambivalences and transformations abound. Her research has appeared in the European Journal of Marketing, International Marketing Review, Qualitative Market Research and Journal of Business Research, among others.

Elizabeth Snuggs

Elizabeth Snuggs is a Senior Lecturer of Management at Monash Business School, Monash University. Her research interests include business education and social research. Her research has appeared in the European Journal of Marketing and the Australasian Marketing Journal.

Dewi Tojib

Dewi Tojib is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Monash Business School, Monash University. Her main research interests include consumer responses to service failures and technology use in organizational and consumer context. Her research has been published in journals such as Journal of Service Research, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Marketing Management, and Journal of Services Marketing.