MOTIVATION, MEANING, AND PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR
The chapters in this section reflect on a set of intersecting questions about who supports and participates in nonprofit organizations and why. Beyond these empirical questions, the authors reflect on what the concepts mean. A prominent theme is that the answers are conditioned by how we define an act of giving. To some degree, the challenges of such definitions are technical; we would like to know the monetary donations of all households, but information from tax returns excludes all non-itemizers. Beyond the need for better data, the authors drive home the point that decisions about what counts are constitutive and draw the boundaries of the nonprofit sector. Analyses of how much people give or volunteer and why are tied to normative and ethical debates about different understandings of secular and religious commitments, public value, and the public benefit. Furthermore, how we understand and measure particular acts of giving have downstream implications for what we find when we analyze the broader social and organizational factors that promote or inhibit charitable acts. What we find then plays a role in shaping consequential policies such as nonprofit evaluations by intermediary organizations or tax preferences. Thus, questions of what we mean by giving or volunteering can have substantial effects that spill over to shape the sustainability of different types of nonprofits.
In Chapter 23, Pamela Paxton reviews core findings and discusses the challenges related to research on charitable giving, interrogating the questions of who gives, to what causes, why, and to what effect. One classic finding in the literature on giving indicates that the greatest giving occurs among the poorest and wealthiest households. Another well-known result points to significant differences in giving priorities between wealthy and nonwealthy donors, with the former giving more to education and the latter more to religion. Problematizing this accepted “knowledge,” she underscores how different kinds of measurement matter greatly for understanding giving behavior. For example, a focus on formal giving typically underestimates total giving, and formal giving may be higher among the wealthy. Acts of generosity such as remittances among immigrant communities, helping extended family members, or giving immediate cash donations to the homeless are not counted in most giving estimates. Estimated household giving levels are typically calculated from itemized tax returns, but only a small proportion of the poorest families submit itemized tax returns. We do not know if non-itemizers give more or less of their household income to charity.
Paxton argues that a charitable gift is fundamentally a relationship between a donor and a nonprofit. As a relational construct, a gift cannot be distilled down to either just the amount given or the amount received. In order to understand charitable giving more fully, we must examine three influences capturing all sides of the relationship between donor and recipient: (1) the traits and motivations of individual donors (the supply side); (2) the characteristics and activities of nonprofits (the demand side), and (3) the social, economic, and political forces that are external to but influence the individual–nonprofit relationship. As noted in earlier parts of the volume, the relationship between donor and recipient is changing in part because of a growing movement to focus on gifts that show instrumental effectiveness more than focusing on a warm glow or sense of well-being for the giver. Paxton closes by discussing the movement toward effective philanthropy, raising the question of whether donors can truly be expected to privilege dispassionate calculations over subjective preferences.
In Chapter 24 Laura K. Gee and Jonathan Meer consider whether activities that increase donations to one nonprofit (or donations made through one specific method) come at the expense of others. Much of the research on charitable giving has concentrated on how to increase monetary donations to a single organization, often looking at whether donors respond to self-interest or the instrumental effectiveness of their gift. We know there are, in some years, massive fluctuations into (or away from) certain organizations, such as the Red Cross’s increase in donations following a disaster (or decrease following scandal). Despite well-recognized organizational fluctuations, overall giving has remained relatively constant as a proportion of GDP for many years. Thus, Gee and Meer ask, do donors have a fixed budget of altruistic acts, or is the overall altruism budget expandable?
They explore the answer to this question by first discussing whether an act needs to be totally unselfish to be counted in the altruism budget. Gee and Meer assess the various components of the altruism budget, including but not limited to monetary donations, volunteering of time, and in-kind gifts. The bulk of their chapter analyzes current research on how changes in one type of giving affect others, both over time and contemporaneously. The findings of shifts over time are consistent if somewhat counterintuitive; future giving does not seem to be reduced by current giving, suggesting that the altruism budget is expandable across time. However, the impact of an act of giving on contemporaneous gifts to other charities or on other forms of giving is more difficult to summarize. These questions are of fundamental importance to broader issues about philanthropy. The implications of fund-raising activities are very different for society if fund-raising is a zero-sum game, in which donations given to one cause crowd out donations to another. If resources spent on fund-raising merely cannibalize donations from elsewhere, then many of these efforts may be wasteful.
In Chapter 25 Nina Eliasoph reveals how an emphasis on the voluntariness of donating time generates misleading ideas about volunteering. “Voluntariness” is, she argues, a placeholder for something we value: volunteering potentially offers free labor, camaraderie, altruism, and job training. Volunteers propagate cultural identities, create social capital, and fight for social change. Volunteer settings can give people a chance to learn how to make decisions together and think about the bigger social picture. Getting to the most fundamental issues in the study of volunteering requires an explicit focus on which actions are actually valued rather than relying on voluntariness as an abstraction that allows the underlying purpose to be assumed rather than stated directly.
Eliasoph problematizes three common ways of distinguishing volunteering from other kinds of activities: the presence or absence of state coercion, payment, and customary moral obligation. She shows that these three common definitions obscure much of the reason why we care about volunteering: its ability to provide a range of social goods. She makes the case for shifting our focus from voluntariness to the social goods the person who is examining volunteer work actually cares about, be they providing needed free labor, creating “schools for democracy,” or something else. Although distinguishing volunteering from other kinds of work is not easy, the borders between the voluntary sector and other sectors are often where the most interesting action takes place.
In Chapter 26, Brad R. Fulton outlines the significant and pervasive influence of religious organizations in the U.S. nonprofit sector. Congregations continue to be the most ubiquitous voluntary organization in the United States, and other types of faith-based organizations maintain a substantial presence in every major domain of the nonprofit sector. They are distinct in many ways, from the meaning they can bring lives of individuals and families to the special protections afforded solely to religious organizations to guarantee their separation from the state. Perhaps most importantly, Americans “choose” their congregations, that is, we do not have a national religion. Thus, American voluntarism and religious commitment are intertwined.
At the same time, in response to broader social changes, religious organizations are experiencing some of the same shifts of organizational structure, culture, and identity, such as growing concerns about inequality and diversity, as well as pressures of financial sustainability. Some have taken on new corporate-style management structures and use social entrepreneurship as a tool for sustainability, while others blend secular and religious elements. Pursuing such research can broaden our understanding of who participates in the sector and how different types of organizations define, run, and adapt themselves in a complex institutional environment amid shifting social, political, and economic conditions.
Fulton begins by defining the field of religious nonprofit organizations and estimating the distribution of religious organizations in the major nonreligious domains of the nonprofit sector—a task far less straightforward than it may first appear. Like Eliasoph in the previous chapter, he reflects on the categorization challenges that are involved. He identifies religious nonprofits’ distinctive characteristics and examines how they are similar to their secular counterparts, illustrating that in the contemporary world the activities and goals of many religious organizations are often closely aligned with those of secular nonprofit organizations. Given this alignment, the chapter then explores various research avenues for approaching religious nonprofits as formal organizations. Examining religious entities brings the limits of current organization theories into sharp relief, helping to shed light on trends toward rationalization and professionalization in the religious sphere.
The landscape of charitable giving has changed markedly over the past few decades, particularly with increasing emphases on measurement of effectiveness and efficiency on multiple fronts becoming of greater consequence. We can now talk about the effectiveness of congregations almost as routinely as we talk about school or hospital effectiveness. In part, emphases on categorization and measurement stem from a growing movement advocating for philanthropy that is motivated by proof of impact. Although effective altruism remains a small part of the field, it has influential champions and is having widespread impact. There are several reasons to be cautious, however. Scientific information can turn off positive emotions and remind donors of the uncertainty of measuring outcomes, thus reducing giving. Measures of giving or volunteering and their effects are also often reductionist; indicators hide contested normative assumptions about the boundaries of the sector, ethical justifications for why we want to measure a particular outcome, and multiple reasonable perspectives involved. A partial solution is to be explicit and targeted in establishing boundaries. For example, proponents of effective altruism may get more traction with other donors if they abandon cause neutrality and allow people to donate passionately across causes but effectively within causes. Broadly, understanding the nonprofit–individual relationship, how external forces shape that relationship, and how giving can be improved will allow both donors and nonprofits to increase charitable giving, plan for negative external shocks, and better allocate charitable gifts to produce the most consequential outcomes.