Philanthropic Gift-giving as Vehicle of Pollution and Purification: A Pragmatic Perspective on Civil Society

At present the voluntary and philanthropic sectors are experiencing significant public attention, especially regarding how they can be involved as providers of public welfare services. In the US and Europe the national governments set up councils and think-tanks talking about co-creation and municipalities developing voluntary strategies. While unions develop rules for the cooperation between voluntary and public officials, philanthropic and voluntary organisations discuss how to handle the balance between involvement, corporation and freedom in the relationship with the public sector (e.g. Salamon 1998; Fung 2003). In addition, numerous researchers question the benefit and consequences of the growing “professionalisation” (Hwang and Powell 2009) and use of business-like organisational forms in philanthropic and voluntary organisations (e.g. Dart 2004). They point to the threat of commercialisation and the logic of business-like organisational forms which might jeopardise the specific characteristics and values of philanthropy, charity and voluntarism (Meyer & Simsa 2014). Central to the debate is on one side the question of how voluntary and philanthropy associations can contribute to inclusion and citizenship among vulnerable groups, and on the other the question of how they can avoid being "polluted" by the state and market logic and maintain its distinctness rooted in civil society´s values and logics.