Bang for the Buck: Responsibility and Value in American Corporate Giving

• 발행기관: 한국아메리카학회
• 저자명: Kyung-Nan Koh
• 간행물 정보: 『미국학논집』제51집 1호, 107~127쪽, 전체 21쪽
• 주제분류: 인문학 > 기타인문학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2019.05.30

영문 초록

This paper discusses how corporate social responsibility discursively affects corporate giving and entails organization-internal transformation of the value of the gift. With ethnographic data gathered at a consulting company and a major client corporation of the company, it examines how responsibility inflects philanthropy in a way that formalizes and rationalizes it, and how corporate actors making giving decisions aim for reproduction of philanthropy through justifications and circulations of generosity. Analysis of decision-making sessions reveals that personal knowledge about potential recipients’ organizational stability impacts the estimation of the worthiness of causes and the value of the gift. Using insights from anthropology, the process is contextualized as that of recreating the value of the gift in a way that can induce positive evaluations from contributors and also the larger region in which the corporation is situated. Reciprocity of the gift is anticipated by attempting to ensure that the recipients’ names and signatures can help circulate generosity; and thereby indexically reproduce the corporation’s position and role in the wider chain of institutional philanthropy.

목차

I. Introduction

II. Making Responsibility Visible: Rationalization of Giving

III. Gifts as Investment in the Network of Circulation

IV. Conclusion

키워드

corporations gift philanthropy responsibilization semiotic anthropology