Contenu du sommaire : Entreprises philanthropiques

The global rise of philanthropic practices and organizations since the 1990s has been described using many terms, including “strategic philanthropy,” “venture philanthropy,” or, more recently, “philanthrocapitalism.” These terms attempt to capture both the development of supposedly new ways of doing philanthropy, in search of greater efficiency and results, and the emergence of a new generation of entrepreneurs committed to working for the common good as part of their economic activities. This article aims at discussing these assumptions. Drawing on the recent works of French-speaking researchers and on the field of philanthropic studies developed in the United States since the 1950s, we then study philanthropic practices of those elites endowed with economic capital, and propose to analyze their gifts as indissolubly economic, symbolic, and political investments. This allows us to further examine the strategies that philanthropic organizations use to maximize the effects of their gifts, and to incite other actors—whether public or private—to do the same. Finally, we study how these gifts bring benefits to their givers, and allow them to convert a fraction of their economic capital into other kinds of capital in an effort to consolidate their position.

This article has two main aims. First, we define and describe the notion of “philanthrocapitalism,” a global movement that purports to make philanthropy more effective by applying the market logic of the corporate sector to the charitable sector. In contrast to other analyses of philanthrocapitalism, we suggest that an increase in the scale of private disbursements is not the defining feature of new philanthropic models. What is new is the use of bequests from philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to directly subsidize large corporations. This point leads to our second main aim, which is to argue that the most important feature of the new philanthropy is the way that pro-market rhetoric espoused by philanthrocapitalists helps to confer moral legitimacy on pro-corporate government regulation and public spending that directly exacerbates economic inequality. Importantly, this moral legitimacy can only last as long as the negative effects of pro-corporate government wealth transfers on the public purse are strategically ignored. We suggest that philanthrocapitalist organizations perform an epistemological and moralizing function which renders corporate harms less apparent to the public. Drawing on Max Weber's concept of charismatic authority and on research by criminologists into social harms and crimes of the powerful, we explore how and why elite philanthropic actors, whose existence and actions often harm the public, have managed to successfully present the push for market solutions to human problems as socially beneficial.

This article deals with an alternative, minority current within the philanthropic field in the United States : social change philanthropy. We introduce the actions of these foundations that aim to both change society by fighting against social, economic, and political inequalities, and to change philanthropy itself by creating mechanisms that do not reproduce these inequalities. We analyze this development, first as an organizational challenge, by studying the experiments carried out since 1970s, then as a personal challenge for these rebellious inheritors, who use their fortune to fight against the hegemony of their own social class.

The philanthropic work of fundraising is characterized by an important relational dimension. The professionalization of the sector has led to the emergence of techniques to improve the effectiveness of fundraising. Among them is cultivation, which aims to establish a personal relationship with individual donors to engage them or to get them to give more. This article aims to analyze the philanthropic relationship between donor and recipient in the context of cultivation, to understand if this relationship is characterized by a form of domination. To do so, we will focus on a particular form of philanthropy, that of American Friends groups of French cultural institutions (American Friends of the Louvre, American Friends of Versailles and so on). The American Friends are American organizations that benefit from 501(c)(3) status, which allows American patrons to make tax exempt gifts to foreign institutions. This analysis is based on qualitative research carried out in France and the United States and based on observations, interviews, and analysis of documents and archives.

This article examines the relationship between a commercial company and an organization focused on solidarity that together are involved in distributing food to poor people. The forms of this relationship are considered through a fieldwork study conducted in the Médoc peninsula, in southwest France. In this area, within the wine production sector, both “precarious” workers and those with great fortunes coexist. This study looks at the transformation of market goods into “philanthropic goods” in stores, a duty vehicle, and in the establishment of an association. Understanding this process also requires interviews to be conducted with its protagonists, in both the commercial realm and that of the solidarity organization. The sociological investigation is at first enlightening regarding the professional logics and calculations that make it possible for a good initially intended to be sold to become a donation. After all possibilities for them to be sold have been exhausted, goods that are entrusted to the volunteers of the solidarity organization can avoid being thrown away. The research then goes on to show the plural dimension of this “second life.” All at once, the donations have a “fiscal life” (they allow the company to benefit from increased tax deductions), an “association life” (the solidarity organization is able to function because of the existence of donations), and a “communication life” (the foundation that the company has created presents the donations as actions of solidarity). The dependence of the company, in implementing financial and fiscal strategy, on the solidarity organization allows the latter to avoid being dominated by the former. Unlike many academic works placing a greater emphasis on the imbalance between grantors and grantees, this article shows that, ultimately, a situation of interdependence may form, leading to a kind of symmetrizing of their relationship.

Thanks to various sources (documents, interviews, and Charles Mérieux's professional archives), this article analyzes the part played by the Mérieux Foundation in the development of applied epidemiology in France from the 1970s to the 1990s. On the one hand, the foundation contributed “from the bottom,” at the margins of the state, to the production and the dissemination of new knowledge, thanks to a specific training institute. On the other hand, it contributed “from the top,” as its president was in touch with high level civil servants and government members (even the French presidents), keeping them informed about developments. Providing an alternative to government health policies whilst interacting with the country's top leaders at the same time, the Mérieux Foundation's policy seems to have been typically philanthropic.

This article shows how a philanthropic organization, Open Society Foundations (OSF), contributes to building the fight against discrimination as an organizational field within the European institutional sphere. OSF operates according to a strategy already studied in the case of other foundations : through “enrolling” different grantee organizations into a collective project. However, OSF is a specific case because of its direct intervention as a protagonist of the field, either as part of coalitions with NGOs, or in its own name as a lobby in the EU arena. OSF is indeed a hybrid actor : it is a grant-maker with considerable resources in a time of increasing scarcity of public funding, but it also acts as a think tank and a lobby, basing its public policy proposals on both the expertise of highly qualified employees and on the knowledge provided by its grantees. Therefore, OSF differs from the model described in the literature of philanthropic organizations which indirectly and “subtly” shape social movements and their organizational fields.

Social movement scholars have demonstrated that foundation patronage channels social movements away from radical activities toward moderate goals, but accounts of how this process occurs are underdeveloped. Existing research typically focuses on foundations' differential selection of grant recipients (i.e., “cherry-picking” nonthreatening groups) and transformation of particular recipient organizations over time (i.e., professionalizing grassroots groups). Scholars have overlooked ways in which foundations shape social movements by building or restructuring entire organizational fields. Foundation-led “field-building” activities may embed social movement organizations (SMOs) in new contexts and enroll them in new projects, thus channeling protest in subtle ways. This argument is illustrated with the case of forest certification—a form of governance created in the 1990s as a moderate, market-based alternative to disruptive environmental boycotts. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data, I show how foundations coordinated their grant-making to build a field of forest certification, enrolled social movement organizations in this project, and used the leverage of protest to further their fieldbuilding agenda.

Relationships between public administrations and circus contractors were profoundly transformed following President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's launch of the first cultural policy in favor of circuses. By focusing on this new situation, this article shows the reciprocity of the links between the social identification process of a practice and public policy's approaches to it. More precisely, the data allows us to identify three elements of the policy on circuses between 1978 and the middle of 1990s : its genesis, its redirection and the reasons put forward, and their effects on professional dynamics.