The philanthropy scale: a sociological perspective in measuring new forms of pro social behaviour

Abstract

Philanthropy re-appears on the public stage. It has become part again of daily life in most industrialized countries. Growing wealth, uneven distributed, evokes the philanthropic response. The media attention for donors as Gates and Buffet may proof this. But also the plea for a “civil society” in Western European welfare states and the founding of the Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit in the P.M. Cabinet in the UK (2005) show a shift from state responsibility into the direction of “market” and “philanthropy”. The European Commission launched December 2007 the “European Forum on Philanthropy and Research Funding”. Giving Campaigns have been started in France and the UK , the release of Clinton’s book Giving (2007), the fast growth of community foundations and family foundations (Gouwenberg et al 2007), these facts and actions all show a strong and renewed appearance of philanthropy in industrialized economies. Scholars follow and rediscover philanthropy as an interesting domain of research (Bekkers and Wiepking 2007). They stem from different academic disciplines and cover a wide range and different aspects of the phenomenon. Psychologists, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, all strive to discover the underlying incentives, facilitators and motivators of philanthropic behavior. These developments at the academia side as well as at the philanthropic practice, amplify each other. A first question emerges “how may the appearance of a new kind of philanthropy be explained?” and “how may this new kind of philanthropy be defined?” [...]