Our research

International Journal of Management Reviews (2021, volume 23, issue 3)

Mairi Maclean, Charles Harvey, Ruomei Yang and Frank Mueller

Elite philanthropy—voluntary giving at scale by wealthy individuals, couples and families—is intimately bound up with the exercise of power by elites. This theoretically oriented review examines how big philanthropy in the United States and United Kingdom serves to extend elite control from the domain of the economic to the domains of the social and political, and with what results. Elite philanthropy, we argue, is not simply a benign force for good, born of altruism, but is heavily implicated in what we call the new age of inequalities, certainly as consequence and potentially as cause. Philanthropy at scale pays dividends to donors as much as it brings sustenance to beneficiaries.

The research contribution we make is fourfold. First, we demonstrate that the true nature and effects of elite philanthropy can only be understood in the context of what Bourdieu calls the field of power, which maintains the economic, social and political hegemony of the super‐rich, nationally and globally. Second, we demonstrate how elite philanthropy systemically concentrates power in the hands of mega foundations and the most prestigious endowed charitable organizations. Third, we explicate the similarities and differences between the four main types of elite philanthropy—institutionally supportive, market‐oriented, developmental and transformational—revealing how and why different sections within the elite express themselves through philanthropy. Fourth, we show how elite philanthropy functions to lock in and perpetuate inequalities rather than remedying them. We conclude by outlining proposals for future research, recognizing that under‐specification of constructs has hitherto limited the integration of philanthropy within the mainstream of management and organizational research.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (2021, volume 50, issue 5)

Ruomei Yang, Charles Harvey, Frank Mueller and Mairi Maclean

We examine the role of mediators in locally embedding the community foundation model of philanthropy to enable its global diffusion. We hold that mediators, as trusted agents within elite networks, promote and legitimate institutional innovation by tailoring the model to satisfy local requirements. They thereby limit resistance while creating future potentialities. Our novel addition to the community foundation literature stems from research on the transatlantic diffusion of the community foundation template from the United States to the United Kingdom focused on an in-depth case study of one of Europe’s largest community foundation, that serving Tyne & Wear and Northumberland in North East England. Our findings suggest that success in embedding the community foundation model depends on rendering it fit-for-context and fit-for-purpose. Mediators operating at both the macro and micro level matter because they have the cultural, social, and symbolic capital needed to win acceptance for initially alien philanthropic principles, practices, and structures. 

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Critical Perspectives on Accounting (2020, volume 73)

Journal of Business Ethics (2020, volume 173)

Charles Harvey, Jillian Gordon and Mairi Maclean

A salient if under researched feature of the new age of global inequalities is the rise to prominence of entrepreneurial philanthropy, the pursuit of transformational social goals through philanthropic investment in projects animated by entrepreneurial principles. Super-wealthy entrepreneurs in this way extend their suzerainty from the domain of the economic to the domains of the social and political. We explore the ethics and ethical implications of entrepreneurialphilanthropy through systematic comparison with what we call customaryphilanthropy, which preferences support for established institutions and social practices. We analyse the ethical statements made at interview by 24 elite UK philanthropists, 12 customary and 12 entrepreneurial, to reveal the co-existence of two ethically charged narratives of elite philanthropic motivations, each instrumental in maintaining the established socio-economic order. We conclude that entrepreneurial philanthropy, as an ostensibly efficacious instrument of social justice, is ethically flawed by its unremitting impulse toward ideological purity.

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Business History Review (Volume 93, Issue 3)

Charles Harvey, Mairi Maclean and Roy Suddaby

We define philanthropy as voluntary giving by households or corporate bodies to promote charitable causes, projects, and organizations or, alternatively, as “voluntary action for the public good.” Entrepreneurial philanthropy refers specifically to “the pursuit by entrepreneurs on a not-for-profit basis of big social objectives through active investment of their economic, cultural, social and symbolic resources.” Government projects financed by taxation and interfamily resource transfers are never philanthropic. Gifts only qualify as philanthropic when the donor is under no compulsion to give, when the gift benefits people with whom the donor is not directly connected, when the gift is made from the donor's own resources, and when the donor receives no direct economic benefit as a consequence of making the gift. In other words, philanthropists invest their own resources in causes they believe will benefit others and that yield no direct benefit to themselves or their families.

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Critical Perspectives on Accounting (2020, volume 69)

Charles Harvey, Mairi Maclean and Michael Price

Why does disclosure continue to be seen as a panacea for failings in corporate governance, despite mounting evidence that it is a weak instrument of control? Through a micro-historical study of the constitution and deliberations of the Greenbury committee, which placed executive remuneration disclosure at the heart of UK corporate governance, we demonstrate how disclosure was discursively constructed by elite business leaders as a primary requirement of accountability of agents to owners. Our research, conducted twenty years after the publication of the Greenbury recommendations in 1995, is based on oral history interviews with surviving members of the committee and its professional advisers, who came to lament that their efforts perversely had helped escalate rather than moderate top executive pay. We argue that disclosure is a poor surrogate for real engagement by owners in corporate governance, and propose four general conditions that, if satisfied, might lead to increased accountability.

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Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (2018, volume 31, issue 5)

Michael Price, Charles Harvey, Mairi Maclean and David Campbell

The purpose of this paper is to answer two main research questions. First, the authors ask the degree to which the UK corporate governance code has changed in response to both systemic perturbations and the subsequent enquiries established to recommend solutions to perceived shortcomings. Second, the authors ask how the solutions proposed in these landmark governance texts might be explained. The authors take a critical discourse approach to develop and apply a discourse model of corporate governance reform. The authors draw together data on popular, corporate-political and technocratic discourses on corporate governance in the UK and analyse these data using content analysis and the historical discourse approach. The UK corporate governance code has changed little despite periodic crises and the enquiries set up to investigate and make recommendation. Institutional stasis, the authors find, is the product of discourse capture and control by elite corporate actors aided by political allies who inhabit the same elite habitus. Review group members draw intertextually on prior technocratic discourse to create new canonical texts that bear the hallmarks of their predecessors. Light touch regulation by corporate insiders thus remains the UK approach. This is one of the first applications of critical discourse analysis in the accounting literature and the first to have conducted a discursive analysis of corporate governance reports in the UK. The authors present an original model of discourse transitions to explain how systemic challenges are dissipated.

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Human Relations (2015, volume 68, issue 10)

Mairi Maclean, Charles Harvey, Jillian Gordon and Eleanor Shaw

This article develops theoretical understanding of the involvement of wealthy entrepreneurs in socially transformative projects by offering a foundational theory of philanthropic identity narratives. We show that these narratives are structured according to the metaphorical framework of the journey, through which actors envision and make sense of personal transformation. The journey provides a valuable metaphor for conceptualizing narrative identities in entrepreneurial careers as individuals navigate different social landscapes, illuminating identities as unfolding through a process of wayfinding in response to events, transitions and turning-points. We delineate the journey from entrepreneurship to philanthropy, and propose a typology of rewards that entrepreneurs claim to derive from giving. We add to the expanding literature on narrative identities by suggesting that philanthropic identity narratives empower wealthy entrepreneurs to generate a legacy of the self that is both self- and socially oriented, these ‘generativity scripts’ propelling their capacity for action while ensuring the continuation of their journeys.

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Business History (2011, volume 53, issue 3)

Charles Harvey, Mairi Maclean, Jillian Gordon and Eleanor Shaw

This paper focuses upon the relationship between the business and philanthropic endeavours of world-making entrepreneurs; asking why, how and to what ends these individuals seek to extend their reach in society beyond business. It presents an original model of entrepreneurial philanthropy which demonstrates how investment in philanthropic projects can yield positive returns in cultural, social and symbolic capital, which in turn may lead to growth in economic capital. The model is applied to interpret and make sense of the career of Andrew Carnegie, whose story, far from reducing to one of making a fortune then giving it away, is revealed as more complex and more unified. His philanthropy raised his stock within the field of power, helping convert surplus funds into social networks, high social standing and intellectual currency, enabling him to engage in world making on a grand scale.

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The Sociological Review (2017, volume 65, issue 2)

Roger Burrows, Richard Webber and Rowland Atkinson

Abstract: This paper considers the influence of the burgeoning global ‘super-rich’ on contemporary socio-spatialization processes in London in the light of a contemporary re-reading of Pahl’s classic volume, Whose City? It explores if a turn to ‘big data’ – in the form of commercial geodemographic classifications – can offer any additional insights to a sociological approach to the study of the ‘super-rich’ that extends the ‘spatialization of class’ thesis further ‘up’ the class structure.

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Organization Studies (2016, volume 31, issue 3)

Mairi Maclean and Charles Harvey

Abstract

This paper assumes a network dynamics perspective to explore the charitable sector campaign known as ‘Give it Back, George’, which overturned a threatening tax change announced in the UK Budget 2012. We consider network activity from diverse viewpoints. Collaboration by disparate players enhanced the campaign’s legitimacy, high-status actors with a tertius iungens strategic orientation eschewing the limelight while others took centre stage. While extant research has shown how lower-status actors may profit from the networks of prominent individuals, we demonstrate that the reverse may apply. We suggest that elite actors who activate ties and bring together disconnected others are often less visible than apparent dominant actors. Social movements are not always reformist but may be deployed by elite incumbents to preserve the status quo. The story we narrate here is therefore less concerned with field transformation than with field preservation at the elite level when faced with threatening change.

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International Small Business Journal (2013, volume 31, issue 7)

Mairi Maclean, Charles Harvey and Jillian Gordon

Abstract: The economic crisis has accentuated the social and economic dislocation experienced by disadvantaged communities at a time of unprecedented political and public interest in philanthropy. This has concentrated attention on the contribution that philanthropists might make in addressing socio-economic challenges, and on the role that social innovation might play in regenerating communities. This article adds to the literature on social innovation and social entrepreneurship that aims to integrate theory and empirical practice. By examining social innovation through the lens of a case study of the Community Foundation for Tyne & Wear and Northumberland, the article sheds light on how the sites and spaces of socially innovative philanthropic projects may have a bearing on their success; attention is drawn to the importance of community engagement on the part of social innovators, and the power of self-organization in re-embedding communities. It suggests that storytelling by committed philanthropists may serve as a powerful proselytizing tool for recruiting new donors.

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Journal of Business Venturing (2016, volume 31, issue 3)

Gabriella Cacciotti, James C. Hayton, Robert Mitchell and Andres Giazitzoglu

Abstract: Fear of failure both inhibits and motivates entrepreneurial behavior and therefore represents a rich opportunity for better understanding entrepreneurial motivation. Although considerable attention has been given to the study of fear of failure in entrepreneurship, scholars in this field have investigated this construct from distinct disciplinary perspectives. These perspectives use definitions and measures of fear of failure that are potentially in conflict and are characterized by a static approach, thereby limiting the validity of existing findings about the relationship between fear of failure and entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to delineate more precisely the nature of fear of failure within the entrepreneurial setting. Using an exploratory and inductive qualitative research design, we frame this construct in terms of socially situated cognition by adopting an approach that captures a combination of cognition, affect and action as it relates to the challenging, uncertain, and risk-laden experience of entrepreneurship. In so doing, we provide a unified perspective of fear of failure in entrepreneurship in order to facilitate progress in understanding its impact on entrepreneurial action and outcomes.

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Academy of Management Review (2016, volume 41, issue 4)

Mairi Maclean, Charles Harvey and Stewart R. Clegg

Abstract: The promise of a closer union between organizational and historical research has long been recognized. However, its potential remains unfulfilled: the authenticity of theory development expected by organization studies and the authenticity of historical veracity required by historical research place exceptional conceptual and empirical demands on researchers. We elaborate the idea of historical organization studies—organizational research that draws extensively on historical data, methods, and knowledge to promote historically informed theoretical narratives attentive to both disciplines. Building on prior research, we propose a typology of four differing conceptions of history in organizational research: history as evaluating, explicating, conceptualizing, and narrating. We identify five principles of historical organization studies—dual integrity, pluralistic understanding, representational truth, context sensitivity, and theoretical fluency—and illustrate our typology holistically from the perspective of institutional entrepreneurship. We explore practical avenues for a creative synthesis, drawing examples from social movement research and microhistory. Historically informed theoretical narratives whose validity derives from both historical veracity and conceptual rigor afford dual integrity that enhances scholarly legitimacy, enriching understanding of historical, contemporary, and future-directed social realities.

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Helen Berry

The fascinating story of the children who survived life in London's Foundling Hospital. A unique 'bottom up' view of Britain during a moment of monumental transformation and pursuit of empire, including: the Battle of Trafalgar; the growth of London; and the rise of factory employment. Includes first hand accounts by former foundling children, to reveal the suffering and small triumphs they experienced during a period of great social upheaval. A new perspective on the history of charities in supplying child workers during the Industrial Revolution, including the changing ideas of the era on how to best tackle poverty.

Berry, H. (2019) Orphans of Empire: The Fate of London's Foundlings, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Abstract: Philanthropy is the voluntary gift of resources from private wealth to promote charitable causes, projects or organizations. Based on original research and a review of the existing literature, the purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the philanthropic landscape in Britain and to explain how philanthropy serves as a force for good in society. It begins by introducing the types of actors operating in the philanthropic field; the often confusing array of donors, foundations and beneficiaries of different types and hues. It outlines the choices confronting philanthropists and the different organisations and tools that exist to facilitate, maximize and effectively utilize philanthropic giving. In the paper, you can also read about the motivations behind philanthropy and the wide range of causes philanthropists support. Philanthropy plays an important role in social innovation through the founding of new organisations and institutions. Large numbers of schools, libraries, hospitals, universities, churches, parks and gardens and community organizations have their roots in philanthropy. Tens of thousands of front-line charities, tackling deep-seated problems at home and abroad and improving the lives of millions of people, are sustained largely by the generosity of private individuals. Overall, the concise discussion of a complex topic makes this paper a valuable introductory guide for prospective philanthropists, third sector professionals, board members of charitable trusts and foundations, interested academics and anyone else interested in understanding how philanthropy works.

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Abstract: This paper surveys the history of philanthropy in the North East of England over a period of more than 900 years, from the time the North East was brought under Norman control (thirty years or so after the Conquest of 1066) down to the present. We paint a broad picture of the role philanthropy has played in the region across the ages, and demonstrate how past endeavours continue to enrich present lives. On the basis of the evidence presented we draw 10 main conclusions: (1) The North East has a long and rich history of philanthropy; (2) There are distinctive aspects to philanthropy in the North East stemming from the concentration of power in the hands of the Bishops of Durham and the merchant community of Newcastle; (3) Enterprise is the motor force of philanthropy; (4) Philanthropy is a major source of social innovation; (5) Social activism is essential to the success of philanthropic ventures; (6) Philanthropy is not just about mega-donors. (7) Prestigious institutions are magnets for philanthropy; (8) Institutions founded on philanthropy must adapt to survive; (9) Philanthropy is a two-way street: improving the lives of beneficiaries while a source of intense satisfaction for donors; (10) Philanthropy in the past lives on in the present. We conclude by answering four fundamental questions about the past, present and future of philanthropy, and present a summary table highlighting the main domains of philanthropy across the more than nine centuries.

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Abstract: This paper surveys the history of philanthropy in the North East of England from the time the North East was brought under Norman control (thirty years or so after the Conquest of 1066) to the end of the fifteenth century. Our purpose is to understand philanthropy in the context of the economics, politics, beliefs, values and social practices of the time. With government effectively de-centralized and wealth very unevenly divided, the conditions existed for major philanthropic initiatives, especially in the two and a half centuries before the Black Death. There were seven main loci of activity, three religious, two religious-secular, and two secular. Philanthropy helped both in fulfilling religious obligations and in increasing the social standing of donors. Building, repairing, extending, adorning, and endowing churches and chapels counted among the most favoured of philanthropic causes. Care for the poor, sick and elderly was another religious injunction placed upon the wealthy by the medieval church. Furthermore, across the region, landed, clerical and entrepreneurial philanthropists played a leading part in creating the infrastructure that made economic and social progress possible.

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Abstract: This paper surveys the history of philanthropy in the North East of England during The Early Modern Era (1501 – 1750) - an era in which the modern British state, conceived as an organized form of collective social power, began to take shape. Our purpose is to understand philanthropy in the context of the economics, politics, beliefs, values and social practices of the time. Our findings show that education and support for the poor and vulnerable were the two most important objects of philanthropy in the North East during the early modern period, as in the rest of England. In both cases, philanthropists came from aristocratic, clerical, landed gentry and entrepreneurial backgrounds, although it is fair to say that while all types of wealth supported philanthropic causes, the entrepreneurial class, relative to means, was disproportionately active.

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