February 8, 2022 -- Heather O'Connor

Challenge or Opportunity? A Discussion of Research on Women’s Pro-choice Philanthropy Conducted During COVID-19

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The pandemic and increased social unrest over the past two years have profoundly affected society, and the instability has impacted social science researchers as well. However, while the uncertainties brought increased challenges to academic research, they also created opportunities to shift and improve research design and analysis. In this session, I present a grounded theory study and discuss how the events of 2020 and 2021 influenced the research design, data collection, and analysis.

The study applies social identity theory to explore the philanthropic motivations and decision-making processes of Catholic women who donate to pro-choice organizations. Prior research demonstrates that donors are more likely to support individuals and groups with whom they identify. However, individuals hold multiple social identities simultaneously, and these identities may be experienced as incongruent. The study examines how incongruent identities inform philanthropic behavior by considering the experiences of Catholic women who identify as pro-choice donors and activists. Semi-structured interviews explored how participants’ religious beliefs and practices influenced their pro-choice philanthropy and vice versa. Findings revealed that participants shared a common process in their development—from children raised in conservative, pro-life Catholic households to adults identifying as pro-choice Catholic donors and activists. The timing of the study allowed for additional insight into how donors to women’s and girls’ causes reprioritized their philanthropic giving during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Heather O’Connor, Ph.D., is a visiting researcher and instructor at the Institute for Nonprofit Administration and Research at Louisiana State University and a research consultant for the Center on Philanthropy and Social Impact at the American College of Financial Services. Her research focuses on nonprofit sector theory and practice with emphasis on nonprofit marketing and communications, the professions of fundraising and philanthropic advising, and the role of identity in philanthropic behavior. Her dissertation research was recognized with the Debra Mesch Doctoral Fellowship for Research on Women’s Philanthropy at the IU Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. 

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February 22, 2022 -- Hahrie Han

Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st C. American Politics

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Book Description

Grassroots organizing and collective action have always been fundamental to American democracy but have been burgeoning since the 2016 election, as people struggle to make their voices heard in this moment of societal upheaval. Unfortunately much of that action has not had the kind of impact participants might want, especially among movements representing the poor and marginalized who often have the most at stake when it comes to rights and equality. Yet, some instances of collective action have succeeded. What’s the difference between a movement that wins victories for its constituents, and one that fails? What are the factors that make collective action powerful?

Prisms of the People addresses those questions and more. Using data from six movement organizations—including a coalition that organized a 104-day protest in Phoenix in 2010 and another that helped restore voting rights to the formerly incarcerated in Virginia—Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa show that the power of successful movements most often is rooted in their ability to act as  “prisms of the people,” turning participation into political power just as prisms transform white light into rainbows. Understanding the organizational design choices that shape the people, their leaders, and their strategies can help us understand how grassroots groups achieve their goals.

Linking strong scholarship to a deep understanding of the needs and outlook of activists, Prisms of the People is the perfect book for our moment—for understanding what’s happening and propelling it forward.

Bio

Hahrie Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in the study of organizing, movements, civic engagement, and democracy. Her newest book will be published by the University of Chicago Press in July 2021, entitled Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America. She has previously published three books: How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century; Groundbreakers: How Obama's 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America; and, Moved to Action: Motivation, Participation, and Inequality in American Politics. Her award-winning work has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and numerous other outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a fifth book, to be published with Knopf (an imprint of Penguin Random House), about faith and race in America, with a particular focus on evangelical megachurches.

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March 22, 2022 -- Joe Henrich

The Cultural Origins of Human Cooperation

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Humans are an ultrasocial species. However, several aspects of this sociality are not easily explained by the canonical approaches found in evolutionary biology, psychology, or economics. Understanding our unique social psychology requires not only accounting for the breadth and intensity of human cooperation but also for the variation found across societies, over history and among behavioral domains (within societies). Here, we introduce an expanded evolutionary approach that considers how genetic and cultural evolution, as well as their interaction, may have shaped both the reliably developing features of our minds and the well-documented differences in cultural psychologies around the globe. We review the major evolutionary mechanisms that have been proposed to explain human cooperation, including kinship, reciprocity (partner choice), reputation, signaling and punishment, discuss key culture-gene coevolutionary hypotheses, such as those surrounding self-domestication and norm psychology, and consider the role of religions, rituals and marriage systems. Empirically, we bring together experimental, observational, and anthropological evidence from studies of children and adults from diverse societies and from non-human primates.

Bio

Dr. Henrich is currently a Harvard Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. Before moving to Harvard, he was a professor of both Economics and Psychology at the University of British Columbia for nearly a decade, where he held the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Coevolution. In 2013-14, Dr. Henrich held the Peter and Charlotte Schoenenfeld Faculty Fellowship at NYU’s Stern School of Business. His research deploys evolutionary theory to understand how human psychology gives rise to cultural evolution and how this has shaped our species’ genetic evolution. Using insights generated from this approach, Professor Henrich has explored a variety of topics, including economic decision-making, social norms, fairness, religion, marriage, prestige, cooperation and innovation. He’s conducted long-term anthropological fieldwork in Peru, Chile and in the South Pacific, as well as having spearheaded several large comparative projects. In 2016, he published The Secret of Our Success (Princeton) and in 2020, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous (FSG).

Additional Information

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-psych-081920-042106?casa_token=I-4v9O7GjOcAAAAA:x4ECPNr7ig5eT5BKn_skdfBnZpoVzelw4BCoQ8KQsL7fXNizOFN6HfsRQGkXQp3F2BDhvl5Xsgbk

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April 12, 2022 -- Ji Ma

Nonprofit studies in many languages: A preliminary study of English and Chinese

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Language creates natural barriers between human societies and shapes different cultures. The landscape of nonprofit and philanthropic studies in non-English languages is uncharted and in the way of pursuing global civil society. What are the shared research interests and scholarship between different linguistic communities? Why some articles written in one language are more likely to be cited in another? This project 1) describes the shared topics between English and Chinese scholarship on nonprofit and philanthropy and 2) explores the citation patterns between the two academic communities from five aspects: rationale of scholarship, contribution to research paradigm, research relevance, social network, and reputation. The English articles that are popular in Chinese journals tend to: 1) focus on instrumentality but not moral values, 2) develop existing paradigms instead of disrupting, 3) be relevant to Chinese research topics, 4) have authors scholarly connected to Chinese community, and 5) be popular references across different languages. As a stimulus for future studies examining other languages, theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.

Bio

Ji Ma is an assistant professor in nonprofit and philanthropic studies at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies and teaches state-society relationship, sociology of knowledge, and computational social science methods from the perspectives of nonprofit and philanthropy.

Pronouns: he/him/his

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