“ON EQUAL GROUND”

Abstract

How can volunteers affirm virtue through volunteering when working conditions make it hard for them to feel good about the help they are giving? A participant-observation study of well-intentioned volunteers in a homeless shelter—who found themselves cast as rule enforcers—shows how people can maintain a positive moral identity under conditions that threaten it. The volunteers used the status differences between themselves and shelter “guests” as resources for fashioning the moral identity “egalitarian.” Volunteers did this by acting like friends to guests, distancing themselves from pejorative cultural images of volunteers, and taking pride in discretionary rule enforcement. When compelled to enforce infantilizing rules, some volunteers sought to protect their identities as egalitarians by altercasting guests as children in need of rules—and thus not deserving of equal treatment. The analysis shows how identity work can both draw on and reproduce inequality.