Professional Volunteerism: Interwoven paradoxes in the management of Roskilde Festival

This paper investigates how volunteer managers from Roskilde Festival experience, enact, and respond to organisational paradoxes and how these paradoxes are both formed by, and sustain, the organisational context of the festival. The festival is a professional world-class event with high standards of performance, while being primarily volunteer-driven. This constitutes a context of “professional volunteerism”, which serves as a locus of interwoven paradoxical tensions. Paradox is often portrayed as a pair of poles that are connected, but in opposition, this paper illustrates how different paradoxes and the responses to them can be interwoven, thereby describing a more complex understanding of paradox.