Found Sci DOI 10.1007/s10699-014-9400-0 COMMENTARY Voluntarism and Citizenship: A Response to Lena Dominelli Maria De Bie · Rudi Roose © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract This article responds to Dominelli’s contribution by mapping three lines of dis- cussion. The first relates to the issue of how to understand voluntary work with regard to the realization of citizenship. The authors argue that this understanding depends on the way cit- izenship is conceived. Whereas a rights-based conception of citizenship focuses on issues of equal access to voluntary work, a duty-oriented notion of citizenship tends to see voluntarism as embedded in an educational strategy, alongside professionalized social work. The authors plead for an alternative understanding of voluntary work and social work as joined partners in practices of ‘learning democracy’. The second line of discussion revolves around the relation between social and political dimensions of citizenship. With Dominelli, the authors point out how the obscuring of the political dimension risks to nurture societal discourses that put pressure on the welfare state. The third point relates to the difficulties in positioning volun- tary work with regard to professional social work. One of these difficulties is the tendency to over-romanticize voluntary work as warm, informal, generous, while giving an exclusively technical reading of social work professionalization. Keywords Citizenship · Learning democracy · Social work · Volunteer work The article written by Lena Dominelli offers an insightful analysis of the ways in which voluntarism, emerging in the current developments towards a Big Society, leads to negative consequences. Dominelli rightly refers to (1) the erosion of citizenship, as voluntaristic discourse and practice weakens the focus on the realization of rights; (2) the erosion of public service delivery, because of the weakening of financial support for these services; (3) greater social inequality; and (4) the possible negative impact of wealthy philanthropists on the development of a social policy focus on structural answers to social problems. M. De Bie (B ) · R. Roose Department of Social Welfare Studies, Ghent University, Henri Durantlaan 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium e-mail: Maria.Debie@Ugent.be 123