Working in collaboration with Professor John Mohan at the University of Southampton a research team drawn from members of CPHSJ contributed to “spoke 2: charity and social redistribution” of the Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy. This was run from a ‘hub’ based at the Cass Business School at City University. The research was jointly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Office of the Third Sector (OTS), Carnegie UK Trust and Scottish Government.

Kent projects:

The organisational and social meaning of corporate charitable donations and their correlates by Matthew Bond

The large economic corporation’s success is largely based on the fact that it unites smaller holdings of capital under a single bureaucratic umbrella. An important institutional feature that allows it to do this is a limited liability, which increases capital formation by limiting the risk individual investors face; however, Coleman (1982, 1990) has pointed out that limited liability has broader social consequences. By permitting the separation of ownership and control (Berle and Means 1932) it depersonalises capital.

The depersonalisation of capital has significant implications for corporate philanthropy. First, corporate philanthropy has been viewed as an abuse of agency by management (Friedman 1970). It is not clear that charitable donations are consistent with strict economic principles, although there is evidence that charitable donations have reputational benefits that may be efficient (Brammer and Millington 2006). Second, scholars such as Coleman (1982, 1990) have investigated how corporations can be re-integrated into social life more broadly. They argue that corporations are ‘normless’ and propose varieties of institutional reform that would enable them to take greater notice of their social responsibilities.

The proposed project builds on and contributes to these research traditions by exploring the relationships between the organisational and social identities of corporate donors and the identities of the charities that benefit from corporate philanthropy. The proposed project has two parts:

1. Identification of corporate philanthropic strategies: While previous research into British corporate philanthropy has focussed on whether corporations make donations and how much they give, less emphasis has been placed on the social identities of the recipients.  This part of the project is designed to create a portrait of corporate philanthropy.
2. Identification of organisational and social correlates of philanthropic strategies: This part of the project examines the extent to which the different philanthropic strategies are correlated with organisational characterisations of corporations and the social characteristics of corporations’ boards.

The moral economy of charitable giving: Working-class and middle-class philanthropy and the needs of others by Balihar Sanghera

This project aims to investigate how individuals of working and middle-class backgrounds morally frame their donations to unknown others and to worthy causes, how they make judgements about how much and to whom to give, and what moral resources, traditions and rules they draw upon in reaching their evaluation about giving.

Benefits and Beneficiaries: four inter-related investigations by Beth Breeze and Iain Wilkinson

This project investigates:

• Donor perceptions of the nature and distribution of charitable benefit
• The role that needs plays in donors’ selection of beneficiaries
• The relationship between givers and receivers and the social space bridged by donations
• The representation of need in charitable appeals and its impact on beneficiaries

The four elements of this project will advance understanding of the role of benefits and beneficiaries within the immensely complex activity of philanthropic transactions.

1. Donor perceptions of the nature and distribution of charitable benefit: UK charities are not constitutionally bound to be redistributive, yet in 1993 Fenton et al found a broad public consensus that “to be a charitable concern a recipient had to be ‘in need’” (p.23). As this finding has not been revisited, this part of the project examines the current extent of, and rationale for, distributional expectations. In the light of the general lack of awareness of what charities are and whom they serve (as identified, for example, in opinion polling by NCVO/ICM in 2003) it also investigates the perception of the nature and extent of charitable benefit.
2. The role that needs plays in donors’ selection of beneficiaries: Whilst the principle of nonmaleficence (‘do no harm’) usually guides our relations with strangers, philanthropy occurs when we decide to intervene in the lives of others (Martin 1994). This part of the project attempts to capture the conditions in which donors’ perception of need results in a positive decision to choose a charity to support.
3. The relationship between givers and receivers and the social space bridged by donations: Responding to the suggestion that charity simply results in recycling of resources within elite groups, this project explores the size of the ‘social space’ bridged by donations to UK charities by exploring the trajectory of donations between typical donors and typical clients of major charities.
4. The representation of need in charitable appeals and its impact on beneficiaries: Ostrander & Schervish argue that philanthropy ought to involve an interdependent relationship between giver and receiver yet the power imbalance means recipients have only the power to accept or refuse gifts (1990). Similarly, Fink (1990) notes that recipients have few, or no, opportunities to define their needs and articulate them directly to funders. American scholars have also identified the supply-driven nature of philanthropy (Schervish 2000) and described how those with resources are able to shape the sector and promote services that favour the rich (Salamon 1987). This final part of the project seeks to explore an aspect of the relationship between funders and recipients in the UK context: the representation of beneficiaries within materials designed to appeal to donors.