EMMETT D. CARSON [*] I INTRODUCTION Even though volunteering has been a distinguishing feature of American society since its inception, scholars continue to struggle with how to accurately describe and measure it. Eleanor Brown's The Scope of Volunteer Activity and Public Service [1] and Helmut Anheier and Lester Salamon's Volunteering in Cross-National Perspective: Initial Comparisons [2] demonstrate that nonprofit scholars have yet to provide the conceptual rigor or collect the necessary data that the subject of volunteering warrants. Although seemingly an easy concept, popular usage and the demands of scholarly precision have made developing an all-purpose definition of volunteering nearly impossible. Even the use of the word amateurs in the title of this issue is misleading. Amateurs, at least as used in everyday conversation, refers to individuals who are not as accomplished or professional as another group. While this may be true of some volunteers, it is unlikely that volunteer firefighters, board members of nonprofit organizations, lawyers who engage in pro bono activities, or medical doctors who work for such groups as the Nobel Prize-winning Doctors Without Borders would describe themselves or should be viewed as amateurs. On the contrary, many of these volunteer groups are the best trained and most experienced at what they do in the entire world. The observations that follow are divided into three sections. The first section examines the conceptual difficulties in defining volunteering and the implications of excluding or including different notions of volunteering. The second section examines the limitations of the data that is currently available to measure the scope and breadth of volunteering. The last section examines what is known about who is asked to volunteer and the implications for institutions that rely on volunteers to carry out their activities. II A QUESTION OF DEFINITION Defining what is meant by volunteering and what activities are included is not an easy task. A wonderful review of these definitional challenges can be found in JonVan Til's Mapping the Third Sector. [3] These definitional questions become more difficult when volunteering is recognized as a cultural activity that is conditioned by multiple factors including ethnic traditions, religious beliefs, and legal regulations. Many definitions of volunteering exclude activities that may benefit the volunteer's family or friends, although it is unclear how this volunteer work is different from the same work performed for a stranger. Is helping one's sick neighbor with yard work or errands to the grocery store different from performing those tasks for a shut-in member of one's church? Does a narrow view of volunteering as it relates to extended family unduly fail to capture the selflessness of ethnic groups such as Latinos for whom such volunteering and giving represents an important aspect of their community? Similarly , for people who rely on a communal clan structure for organizing their activities, do we discount or ignore their volunteer efforts because they do not conform to a western ideological perspective? A key issue is whether informal volunteering is as valued as formal volunteering. Informal volunteering refers to engaging in some activity without the umbrella of a formal organization. In contrast, formal volunteering is activity conducted through a formal organization or government program. This is not an insignificant distinction. It may well be that some racial and ethnic groups or nationalities are more likely to engage in informal rather than formal volunteering. If so, the standard approach of focusing on formal volunteering to the exclusion of informal volunteering may unfairly depict the volunteer behavior of these groups. The definition of volunteering has become so confused by both scholars and the public that it can include both compulsory participation and even remuneration. …