The Routledge Companion to Philanthropy

Tobias Jung, Susan D. Phillips, Jenny Harrow, Tobias Jung, Susan D. Phillips, Jenny Harrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317579700
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

Philanthropy – the use of private resources for public purposes – is undergoing a transformation, both in practice and as an emerging field of study.

Expectations of what philanthropy can achieve have risen significantly in recent years, reflecting a substantial, but uneven, increase in global wealth and the rolling back of state services in anticipation that philanthropy will fill the void. In addition to this, experiments with entrepreneurial and venture philanthropy are producing novel intersections of the public, non-profit and private spheres, accompanied by new kinds of partnerships and hybrid organisational forms. The Routledge Companion to Philanthropy examines these changes and other challenges that philanthropists and philanthropic organisations face.

With contributions from an international team of leading contemporary thinkers on philanthropy, this Companion provides an introduction to, and critical exploration of, philanthropy; discussing current theories, research and the diverse professional practices within the field from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The Routledge Companion to Philanthropy is a rich and valuable resource for students, researchers, practitioners and policymakers working in or interested in philanthropy.

Part I
Setting the scene

Foreword

Helmut Anheier

As philanthropic action, locally and globally, increases and alters in complexity and scope, there is a strong need for a better understanding of contemporary philanthropy. What are philanthropy’s multiple facets, trajectories and ambitions? How is philanthropy developing and changing? What are its risks and rewards? These questions are among some of the diverse and important issues addressed by this Routledge Companion to Philanthropy.

This Companion recognizes and demonstrates the spread of philanthropy scholarship: it offers reflection, admiration and critical engagement with philanthropy as a vital area of practice and scholarship. To this end, it provides both theoretical and empirical insights on which we are able to further build, amend, refresh – and sometimes discard – our understanding and perceptions of philanthropic actions and organizations. Chapters, such as those on philanthropy’s historical growth, institutional patterns, effectiveness and legitimacy, ensure that our awareness of rationales, routines and reputations affecting the ‘why’, ‘where’, ‘for whom’ and ‘how’ of philanthropy in its various guises is increased. Simultaneously, the contributions on non-Western perspectives, the policy-philanthropy nexus, and the ‘dark side’ challenge some of the popular conceptions of philanthropy as ‘the love of humanity’. To highlight the learning implications and the contexts within which we need to understand, interpret and challenge philanthropy, the scholarly contributions are supplemented with illustrative vignettes that demonstrate implications for, and lessons from, the practice of philanthropy.

The variety of philanthropic models and movements, practices and philosophies, trophies and testing grounds discussed in this Companion show how fine-grained philanthropy scholarship has become over recent years. Neither trite descriptions of portentous philanthropic journeys, nor carping assertions of its self-serving nature help the field. Instead, philanthropy theory and practice is enhanced when the various facets of philanthropy discourses and practices are acknowledged and examined: searching for definitiveness and clarity go hand-in-hand with seeking diversity and managing ambiguity. This is where this Companion excels. The Editors have brought together a group of international authors from a diverse set of disciplines. Collectively, they take our knowledge on philanthropic actors and activities forward; they extend the scholarly conversations concerning philanthropy, its actors, activities and promises, all of which are fundamental of civil society and central to the contemporary recasting of the public, private and nonprofit spheres. The Editors and Contributors will value your own contribution to further extending and examining the philanthropy arena: in this book they provide a basis on which you can build.

1
Introduction

A New ‘New’ Philanthropy: From Impetus to Impact

Susan D. Phillips and Tobias Jung

Philanthropy is increasingly being called upon to help solve some of the most serious social, economic and environmental issues of our times. To achieve impacts of this magnitude, many have argued that philanthropy needs to ‘up its game’ (Dean, 2013), that it should be renewed, even revolutionized (Cohen, 2014a). Combined with innovations from within philanthropy itself, such conjectures have led to a reimagining, recasting and rebranding of philanthropy, both as professional practice and as a field of academic research. Expectations of donors and volunteers, ideas about impact and ‘social investment’, new philanthropic tools and technologies, the nature and strategies of major philanthropic institutions, and philanthropy’s relationships with the state and the market are all rapidly evolving. To differentiate these developments from a long tradition of philanthropic fashions and foibles, recent years have seen the emergence and use of various qualifiers: strategic, venture, entrepreneurial, catalytic, high impact, social change, and, simply, ‘new’ philanthropy.

The current appellation of ‘new’ is expressed in the ideas and ideals of ‘philanthrocapitalism’ (Bishop 2006; Bishop and Green 2008). This strongly resembles Andrew Carnegie’s (1901) vision for a more scientific approach to philanthropy; it emphasizes innovation and focuses on the transfer and application of business strategies and market based models (Salamon, 2014). The assumption is that, in an almost ‘laserlike’ way (Bishop and Green 2014: 550), donors articulate clear goals and pursue evidence-based approaches (Brest, 2015) for achieving and measuring impact to address complex, ‘wicked’ problems. This is by no means the first time that philanthropy has been considered ‘new’ (Cunningham, Chapter 2). Furthermore, the turn towards business principles, and the veiled interests inherent therein, has not been without their critics (Edwards, 2008): so far, strategic philanthropy has ‘failed to solve even one social problem once and for all, by penetrating to its root cause’ (Schambra, 2013: NP). Consequently, in the current enthusiasm for a particular style of philanthropy, it is important not to fall under the spell of fashion. Instead, we need to embrace and understand the diversity that has always characterized philanthropy; it is currently making philanthropy even more varied in its ideas, expressions and institutions. This Routledge Companion to Philanthropy explores and reflects on this expanding richness of philanthropy in a manner that is international in scope and that is informed by, and intended to inform, research and practice.

The growing diversity of philanthropy

As three recent examples demonstrate, philanthropy occurs in ways that are big and modest, businesslike and community-first, strategic and spontaneous. Iconic of the power of institutionalized philanthropy is the part played by large foundations in aiding the City of Detroit emerge from bankruptcy in 2014. In order to save the City’s impressive art collection from circling creditors, and to prevent thousands of city workers from losing their pensions or livelihoods, ten philanthropic foundations entered into an ‘improbable arrangement’ (Davey, 2014): they negotiated behind closed doors with unelected officials in which they flexed ‘their political muscle to the limit’ (Schambra, 2014: NP), put together a joint financial contribution of $366 million (Dolan, 2014), and strategically made their grants contingent upon particular outcomes. Although these foundations are playing a critical role in the future of a major city, their involvement has raised major questions about ‘big’ philanthropy: about its transparency, democratic accountability and its influence over public policy.

The bulk of philanthropy, however, occurs at much more modest scales, often rooted in community-based approaches that offer ‘a meeting point where numerous expressions of giving, responsibility and solidarity can come together’ (Hodgson, 2013a: 49). This is illustrated by the Waqfeyat al Maadi Community Foundation (WMCF) in Egypt. Established by a small group of community changemakers in a suburb of Cairo in 2007, WMCF aims to create sustainable sources of funding for building civil society in the area. It seeks to do so by reviving and modernizing the traditional Islamic concept of the waqf endowment (Herrold, 2015). Despite its small size, WMCF has quickly become a community hub, offering a variety of grants, loans and training, as well as arts, neighbourhood improvement and youth engagement programs. While it had navigated tricky political waters by being expressly apolitical, when several members of the Maadi community were shot during the 2011 Tahir Square protests, WMCF needed to assume new leadership responsibilities (Global Fund Community Foundation, 2011; El Daly, 2012), using its asset of community trust to become a source of education for democratic rights, while continuing to lessen the gap of rich and poor in its community.

Finally, social media has added a new degree of spontaneity to philanthropy by enabling more virtual forms of collective action. A prime illustration is the ‘Ice Bucket Challenge’ that went viral in the summer of 2014: millions of people across the globe having buckets of ice water dumped on them to raise money for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), known as motor neurone disease (MND) in the UK. A host of pop stars and former politicians – from Bill Gates to Victoria Beckham and Mark Zuckerberg – took the challenge (Perez, 2014), and more than 2.4 million unique videos, viewed over 10 billion times by more than 440 million people were posted to Facebook (Facebook, 2014). This resulted in ALS/MND associations raising $US 220 million, 100 times their average annual revenue (O’Neil, 2015). Does this sort of ‘viral philanthropy’ represent a new approach for engaging the selfie generation? Does it promote a kind of slacktivism that represents the worst of philanthropy? Does such spontaneity countermand more strategic approaches?

To understand what lies ahead for an evolving, evermore diversified, philanthropy requires us to look beyond business-oriented, strategic approaches. The aim is not to dismiss them, as they have unquestionably taken hold on a large part of philanthropy’s landscape, but to consider other ways in which philanthropy is responding to a changing environment. The following chapters examine this varied landscape. They provide a critical assessment of the history, recent developments and emerging challenges in the field of philanthropy, ranging from the ‘big’ to the community-based. Our volume is purposely international, with contributions by leading scholars from a wide range of countries and disciplines. The contributors address some of the major questions that the agents and critics of philanthropy are grappling with; they identify gaps in the extant knowledge base and suggest productive directions for future reflection and research. The volume’s organizational logic is to move along a continuum of engagement: from the impetus and motivations for philanthropy, through its management in different institutional settings, to how its impact is being assessed.

This introductory chapter concentrates on exploring the developing trends of philanthropy in more depth. It makes the case that the unfolding changes are varied, and at times contradictory, and should compel creative thinking about how to shape philanthropy’s future. Our starting point is a working definition of philanthropy that, rather than sentimentalizing it, can serve as a useful platform for social science research. We then offer a brief overview of recent trends in the inflows and distribution of philanthropy and provide a roadmap through the themes and structure of the 31 chapters and six ‘vignettes’ that follow.

Philanthropy: An expansive definition

Put simply and broadly, philanthropy is the use of private resources – treasure, time and talent – for public purposes. While this builds on Salamon’s (1992: 10) definition as ‘the private giving of time and values (money, security, property) for public purposes’, it extends beyond gifts to embrace some of the new tools and practices of philanthropy. As Salamon (2014: 2) has argued more recently, there has been a ‘massive explosion’ in tools that fit under the umbrella of philanthropy. This is especially noticeable in relation to new forms of social investment and social entrepreneurship. Raising expectations of financial as well as social returns, the promise is to do good while doing well, a recurring theme in philanthropy’s history (Jung and Harrow, 2015a). Furthermore, our definition does not limit philanthropy to acts of the affluent helping the less fortunate (Adam, 2004); in addition to financial contributions, it encompasses volunteering, collective action, and giving of creativity or other talents. As in the outskirts of Cairo, some of the most interesting and promising experiments are occurring in grassroots philanthropy where communities, often very disadvantaged ones, are working together in creative ways to advance economic, social and cultural development that they would neither describe as charitable giving nor as traditional volunteering (Knight, 2012; Kasper et al., 2014). Although our casting of philanthropy provides a broad platform on which to explore a wide range of motivations and actions, it is important to bear in mind that philanthropy remains a contested concept, particularly in its ‘normative valence’ (Daly, 2012: 545).

Our definitional stance contrasts with the popular perception of philanthropy as ‘love of humanity’. This widely espoused notion was first set out in English in Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755 (Sulek 2010; 2011); it is a loose translation from philanthropy’s roots in ancient Greek. Unfortunately, it has perpetuated a normative dimension of benevolence. Even recent definitions, formulated for academic purposes, often retain an emotional and normative aspect. For example, Sulek (2010: 399), after extensive scholarly analysis of the concept’s development, reaches a warm glow interpretation of ‘love motivating the greater realization of human potential’. Similarly, Payton and Moody (2008: 30, 50) assert that the defining feature of philanthropy as ‘voluntary action for the public good’ is ‘morality and moral action’. Such approaches are of limited use in social science research. They make it easy to ignore how philanthropy has been shaped across history by its intellectual, social and political contexts; how at different times philanthropy generated diverse sets of questions and answers regarding its purposes, values, and consequences. Of course, practices that we would call philanthropy are neither restricted to Western perspectives nor to European lineage (Mottiar and Ngcoya, Chapter 9), but it is this heritage that has largely shaped the contemporary assumptions about philanthropy that are represented, and challenged, in this volume.

Philanthropy: A concept of embedded dynamics

First appearing in the fifth century BC in the Greek play Prometheus Bound, ‘philanthropy’ is a compound of ‘phílos’, that which is beloved, dear and important, and ‘ánthrōpos’, a human being. In contrast to the emotion-laden – ‘love of’ – concept that has become so entrenched, McCully (2008: 3) argues that philanthropy is appropriately translated as ‘caring about, seeking, and nourishing human potential’, while Carmichael (2013a) suggests that it expresses a ‘regard for’ humankind. Initially referring to a manner in which certain gods of Greek mythology dealt with mortals, philanthropy necessarily implicated power relationships. However, it also involved reciprocity as it flowed through the social and civic networks of obligation and help that the ancient Greeks had cultivated (Carmichael, 2009). From the very beginning then, philanthropy involved value judgements; it was strategic and practical, oriented to solving collective problems. In essence, the gods were figuring out, and guiding, humanity’s progression.

As philanthropy developed through Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions, it acquired a sense of obligation and duty, particularly in helping the deserving poor and downtrodden. The act of giving, frequently accompanied by the promise of ‘reward in heaven’ (van Leeuwen, 2012: 325), became as important as the gift. When the concept of philanthropy entered popular English use during the seventeenth century, it was imbued with altruistic motivations. In Victorian times, it was further constricted to refer primarily to charitable giving, an interpretation that has stuck to it. Nonetheless, as philanthro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Setting the scene
• PART II The roots of and impulses for philanthropy
• PART III The geographies and scales of philanthropy
• PART IV The intersections of philanthropy and public policy
• PART V The institutions and expressions of philanthropy
• PART VI The management of philanthropy
• PART VII Conclusion: The future for philanthropy research and practice
• Index