Abstract
This article argues that the availability of statistical information on volunteering resulted from
a variety of efforts to make previously obscured contributions to countries’ wealth and well-
being visible as productive activities. Since the late 1960s, economists from the Global South
and feminists criticized international economic standards for their Western and male bias. These
discontents led to the introduction of unpaid work as a new category of international labor
statistics and umbrella term for very diverse activities, such as subsistence farming, housework,
caring, and volunteering. This was the beginning of an epistemic revolution in data collection
with far-reaching consequences. It changed the semantics of the concept of labor and en-
hanced the visibility of women’s and volunteers’ contributions to societies’ well-being. But data
collection also made volunteering more susceptible to political management and economic
exploitation, and its classification under the general category unpaid work tended to blur the
distinction between voluntary and involuntary activities.