Connecting Charity, Power and Care

Connecting Charity, Power and Care draws together cutting-edge research and international case studies to examine contemporary issues in charitable giving. It explores how sociology can critically engage with unequal power relations within the charity sphere, charity’s relationship with mutual aid and the roles of charity and giving in social life.Offering a range of critical perspectives, expert contributors explore a sociology of charity that focuses on the social relations, codes and behaviours, and organisational structures that underpin people’s giving to charity, involvement in charitable acts and mutual aid, and how societies choose to organise voluntary giving. It considers how the processes, theories and methods of sociology help us understand modern charity, and its relationship to other social fields, like social policy, incarceration and justice, and demographic differences and inequalities within giving. Analysing how wider social processes may underpin and affect charitable behaviours, it reveals how being charitable or a charity recipient changes peoples’ lives. Key topics covered include: liberatory philanthropy; nonprofit organizations and social relations; charity in prison; charity retail; charity as statecraft; methods of researching charities and charitable giving; and theories of voluntary action.This book demonstrates the breadth of sociological thinking about charity, the current charitable moments’ links to wider social forces, and the ways charity could be rethought for the future. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of sociology and social policy, public policy, development studies, and politics concerned with charitable giving, mutual aid, philanthropy and state-charity relationships.