Understanding Individual Voluntary Giving as a Practice: Implications for Regional Arts Organisations in the UK

Abstract

This research examines individual voluntary giving as an integrative practice. Our research speaks to the new funding challenges traversing the British arts sector. Historically reliant on government funds, increasingly regional non-profit arts organisations must diversify their income sources and target a range of voluntary givers. By drawing on practice theories and interpretive qualitative data, we illuminate how giving understandings, procedures and engagements interconnect and interact, coming together in ways that lead to specific giving choices that prioritise cause-based charities over the arts. In doing so, we make two original contributions towards existing sociological research on voluntary giving. First, we transform and broaden the scope of empirical research by conceptualising voluntary giving as an integrative practice. Second, we offer a lens through which to investigate and explicate shared social processes, mechanisms and acts that traverse structures and individuals, co-construing and reproducing voluntary giving patterns.

Editorial: Troubled times demand heroes: Heroic marketing and marketing heroes

“…For example, this paternalistic treatment of the oppressed is widely disseminated in non-profit marketing, positioning the donors and donor agencies as heroes and thereby legitimising existing, dominant, neoliberal world views of what is ‘good’ (Hickel, 2017). This view puts the spotlight on certain individuals, minimising the contributions of other actors and wider political processes (Moraes et al, 2020). A consideration of the hero or the heroic therefore requires a historically situated perspective as it is constituted in relations of power within multiple social, cultural, institutional and religious discourses.…”