In the 1880s, fashionable Londoners left their elegant homes and clubs in Mayfair and Belgravia and crowded into omnibuses bound for midnight tours of the slums of East London. A new word burst into ...popular usage to describe these descents into the precincts of poverty to see how the poor lived: slumming. In this captivating book, Seth Koven paints a vivid portrait of the practitioners of slumming and their world: who they were, why they went, what they claimed to have found, how it changed them, and how slumming, in turn, powerfully shaped both Victorian and twentieth-century understandings of poverty and social welfare, gender relations, and sexuality.
The slums of late-Victorian London became synonymous with all that was wrong with industrial capitalist society. But for philanthropic men and women eager to free themselves from the starched conventions of bourgeois respectability and domesticity, slums were also places of personal liberation and experimentation. Slumming allowed them to act on their irresistible "attraction of repulsion" for the poor and permitted them, with society's approval, to get dirty and express their own "dirty" desires for intimacy with slum dwellers and, sometimes, with one another.
Slumming elucidates the histories of a wide range of preoccupations about poverty and urban life, altruism and sexuality that remain central in Anglo-American culture, including the ethics of undercover investigative reporting, the connections between cross-class sympathy and same-sex desire, and the intermingling of the wish to rescue the poor with the impulse to eroticize and sexually exploit them.
By revealing the extent to which politics and erotics, social and sexual categories overflowed their boundaries and transformed one another, Koven recaptures the ethical dilemmas that men and women confronted--and continue to confront--in trying to "love thy neighbor as thyself."
Many scholars and citizens alike have counted on civic groups to create broad ties that bind society. Some hope that faith-based civic groups will spread their reach as government retreats. Yet few ...studies ask how, if at all, civic groups reach out to their wider community. Can religious groups--long central in civic America--create broad, empowering social ties in an unequal, diverse society?
Politics and Volunteering begins by painting a portrait of volunteering in Japan, and demonstrates that our current understandings of civil society have been based implicitly on a U.S. model that ...does not adequately consider participation patterns found in other parts of the world. The book develops a theory of civic participation that, incorporates citizen attitudes about governmental and individual responsibility, with societal and governmental practices that support (or hinder) volunteer participation. This theory is tested using cross-national and sub-national statistical analysis, and it is refined through detailed case studies of volunteering in three Japanese cities. The findings are then used to build the Community Volunteerism Model, which explains and predicts both the types and rates of volunteering in communities around the world. The model is tested using four cross-national case studies (Finland, Japan, Turkey and the United States) and three sub-national case studies in Japan.
This volume presents for the first time an in-depth analysis of the origins of Greek euergetism. Derived from the Greek for 'benefactor', 'euergetism' refers to the process whereby citizens and ...foreigners offered voluntary services and donations to the polis that were in turn recognised as benefactions in a formal act of reciprocation. Euergetism is key to our understanding of how city-states negotiated both the internal tensions between mass and elite, and their conflicts with external powers. This study adopts the standpoint of historical anthropology and seeks to identify patterns of behaviour and social practices deeply rooted in Greek society and in the long course of Greek history. It covers more than five hundred years and will appeal to ancient historians and scholars in other fields interested in gift exchange, benefactions, philanthropy, power relationships between mass and elite, and the interplay between public discourse and social praxis.
The nature of a contract is constructional and it is set by the human will, making it distinguishable from social and experimental realities that are formed in the real world. the question here is ...the extent of the connection between contract and reality. Is it a pure function of reality? Furthermore, we’ll explore the existence and continuation of a contract and how it is affected by external realities in Kant’s volitional school of thought. How effective is the role of the human will in the conclusion of a contract? What are the consequences of pure voluntarism? From the point of view of voluntarists, the contract takes priority rather than reality, and the point of origin for contracts is the human will, and socio-experimental reality cannot be considered the basis of a contract. Equity and the La-Haraj rule are not applicable in this school of thought. In addition to maintaining the integrity of the contract and ensuring its survival under any circumstances and in any location, Pure voluntarism exposes the solidity and Jamud present in contracts. In this school of thought, the lifecycle of the contract is a pure function of the will of its contractors and the human willretains its creative power and is not considered an instrumental aspect. According to this school of thought, this is where the benefits of the power of reasoning and human will prove important, and the principle of voluntarism plays an infrastructural role in the conclusion of a contract. The transactional relationship between the parties requires an adjustment of the pure voluntarism school of thought, to account for socio-experimental reality as well. Moderate positivism claims that a contract is influenced by reality, which adjusts the pure voluntarism school of thought in contracts.
Area-based initiatives (ABIs) is a frequently used strategy within contemporary urban regeneration policies to tackle physical and social challenges in deprived neighbourhoods. A central ...characteristic of their approach is active involvement of local stakeholders as part of making robust and lasting improvements. The claim raised in this article is that urban regeneration mobilizes citizens through a narrow perception of “voluntarism” that tends to exclude vulnerable and socially marginalized citizens. The article presents a typology of voluntarism that makes a distinction between (a) social voluntarism, (b) civic voluntarism and (c) hybrid voluntarism, combining non-paid voluntarism with pro-profit activities. Empirically, we draw on studies from ABIs in Denmark where collaboration with charity organizations and hybrid organizations has been used to mobilize marginalized citizens in the urban regeneration areas. We find that collaborations with charity-based and hybrid organizations are sparse and small-scale so far, but appear promising with regards to involve socially vulnerable groups.
Acts of Compassion Wuthnow, Robert
2012, 1991, 1991-01-01, 19910101
eBook
Robert Wuthnow finds that those who are most involved in acts of compassion are no less individualistic than anyone else--and that those who are the most intensely individualistic are no less ...involved in caring for others.
Exhorting people to volunteer is part of the everyday vocabulary of American politics. Routinely, members of both major parties call for partnerships between government and nonprofit organizations. ...These entreaties increase dramatically during times of crisis, and the voluntary efforts of ordinary citizens are now seen as a necessary supplement to government intervention. But despite the ubiquity of the idea of volunteerism in public policy debates, analysis of its role in American governance has been fragmented. Bringing together a diverse set of disciplinary approaches, Politics and Partnerships is a thorough examination of the place of voluntary associations in political history and an astute investigation into contemporary experiments in reshaping that role. The essays here reveal the key role nonprofits have played in the evolution of both the workplace and welfare and illuminate the way that government’s retreat from welfare has radically altered the relationship between nonprofits and corporations.
Voluntary and community organisations have moved to the centre of political debates, as the new UK government reduces the scope of the state and locates solutions in civil society. This new book ...explores the extensive growth and reshaping of the voluntary sector following sweeping changes to social and welfare policy over 30 years. It draws on contemporary social and organisational theory and debates to consider whether surviving in the voluntary sector now depends on realigning activities and compromising independent goals and values.
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