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The impacts and legacies of sports events
Edited by Richard Shipway and Naomi Kirkup
Introduction
Volunteers are a key element of mass sports. On the one hand, they support, through their engagement, the existence of many non-profit sport clubs and on the other hand they guarantee the operation of small-scale, major and mega sport events. For instance, in Germany 1.85 million people are engaged as volunteers in sport clubs ([12] Breuer and Wicker, 2011). The importance of volunteers' involvement in non-profit organisations has been highlighted (e.g. [12] Breuer and Wicker, 2011; [45] Lasby and Sperling, 2007). Volunteer hours for non-profit sport clubs amounted to 37.2 million hours in Germany in 2009 indicating a monetary value of 6.7 billion euros ([12] Breuer and Wicker, 2011). Being part of non-profit sport clubs, volunteers contribute through societal welfare ([36] Heinemann, 2005). Moreover, volunteers are important for the production process in the staging of major and mega events ([34] Getz, 1997; [66] Williams et al. , 1995). Most sport events on a regional, national or international level could not be staged without the voluntary engagement of many people. Consequently, with regard to terminology it can be concluded that sport volunteering encapsulates every voluntary engagement in sports and sport event volunteering focuses solely on events. The latter can be defined as persons involved in "any event where sporting activity or competition is the focus" ([26] Cuskelly et al. , 2006, p. 135).
The contribution of volunteers is significant for every organisation and thus it is important to have an understanding of the volunteers' underlying motivations, the recruitment of volunteers and their retention ([4] Bang and Chelladurai, 2009). [4] Bang and Chelladurai (2009) drawing on the work of [48] MacDuff (1995) point to a typology of volunteers, namely continuous and episodic. Continuous volunteers are those who are involved over a long period of time with an organisation and devote a lot of time to it, while episodic volunteers are those who provide their service at special events and/or any kind of programme ([4] Bang and Chelladurai, 2009; [48] MacDuff, 1995) such as for instance a one-off voluntary engagement at a non-profit sport club. As the type of voluntary engagement differs, it is assumed that the underlying motivations are also diverse...