Fundraising Discourse and the Commodification of the Other

Abstract

Fundraising and marketing of aid are increasingly sophisticated forms of business transaction covering a set of legal and economic aspects such as charity law, volunteering, tax-effective giving, philanthropy, donations and bequest solicitation, etc. (Sargeant & Jay 2002, Tempel 2002). Fundraising is also related to ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ aimed at presenting corporations as generous and responsible by means of integrating social and environmental factors in their business activities, far beyond, so we are told, of what the law actually requires. While the act of giving in the realm of philanthropy perhaps first of all is motivated by an individual’s willingness to sacrifice some part of his/her economic or temporal surplus in order to help others, it is also imbued with innovative business models where this initial incentive is optimized (Seiler 2005). Soliciting the goodwill and financial generosity of the individual giver is obviously claimed as the most legitimate concern in any kind of fundraising transaction. This activity, however, takes place with the help of the continuous development of business models where the altruism, empathy and the human ability to establish relations are operationalized in more concrete transactional terms. Thus, the process in which generosity is operationalized in methods and technologies for giving can be referred to as a process in which the intentions and actions of a donor are commodified (Thrift 2005). Without questioning the general good intentions of fundraising or the authentic generosity of givers, there is certainly a tension between the giver’s empathy for others, on the one hand, and the calculating rationality of the fundraiser, on the other, in his or her effort of marketing or persuading a potential donor (Derrida 1992). It is far beyond this introduction, however, to go deeper into this fascinating blend of altruism and business rationality. A more thorough analysis of fundraising would need to relate to important themes in economic anthropology focusing on issues such as the symbolic representation of money and the moral evaluation of monetary exchange in order to explore the range of cultural meanings around monetary transactions (Bloch & Parry 1989, Parry 1989). Influential economic theories, e.g. by Marx and Simmel in their respective ways, state that money acts as a powerful agent of social and cultural transformation. Money is credited with intrinsic power and attributed as the agent of social change. They also note that money encapsulates a spirit of rationality, calculability and anonymity that may potentially both cause and stand in contrast to a spirit of community associated with an idealized Gemeinschaft. The historical observation that money is linked to the growth of individualism and to the decline of communities of solidarity in which social bonds are dissolved (but also strengthened) is a theory that may be typically Western in its outlook. In this context, the observation by Mauss (1990) that money permits possession at a distance provides a critical vantage point to analyse the beneficiality of aid in a postnational context. In their plea for an ‘ethics of representation’ in marketing, Borgerson & Schroeder (2002) note that theoretical considerations of representation Senior lecturer, teaching communication studies, at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.