Philanthropy A Literature Review

1. PhilanthropyA Literature Review WIMPS Seminar Center on Philanthropy, IUPUI November 12, 2007 René Bekkers ICS/Department of Sociology Utrecht University, the Netherlands

2. The paper Bekkers, R. & Wiepking, P. (2007). ‘Generosity and Philanthropy: A Literature Review’. Joint work with Pamala Wiepking, Philanthropic Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation

3. The field of philanthropic studies D.H. Smith (1975): Philanthropic studies is an interdisciplinary field But exactly how interdisciplinary is the field? What is the knowledge base for philanthropic studies? And where is it? The literature is scattered over disciplines - multidisciplinary is a better label How did the field expand over the past 50 years? How frequently has philanthropy been studied in different disciplines?

4. What do we know already? Existing literature reviews have limited scope Charng & Piliavin (1990): altruism question Andreoni (2006) and Vesterlund (2006): focus on economic models Lindahl & Conley (2002): 1985-2002, focus on higher education Sargeant & Woodliffe (2007): focus on marketing

5. The ambition Find all empirical studies on philanthropy that have ever been published in academic outlets Identify clusters of themes Describe the results of the studies Assess progress in the field Identify the major questions that we need to answer

6. Where we got our stuff Snowball sampling: Online full text collections Academic databases (PsychInfo, Sociological Abstracts, PubMed, EconLit) Google Scholar Our own literature databases References cited in the articles we found Payton Library Philanthropic Studies Index Arnova Abstracts

7. Inclusion criteria Publicly available empirical studies in English Dependent variable: giving of money to organizations by adults NOT: giving by children, corporations, ‘giving’ of fictitious money and cooperation in laboratory games Result: approximately 500 studies

8. A Growing Field