Journal of Organizational Ethnography: Volume 8 Issue 1

Charities under austerity: ethnographies of poverty and marginality in Western non-profit and charity associations

Hugo Valenzuela-Garcia, Miranda Jessica Lubbers, James Gordon Rice

Charity’s dilemmas: an ethnography of gift-giving and social class in Croatia

Karin Doolan, Dražen Cepić, Jeremy F. Walton

The purpose of this paper is to explore charitable giving and receiving as a site of social class interaction in Croatia today, particularly in relation to the country’s socialist…

Charities as symbolic families: ethnographic evidence from Spain

Jorge Grau Rebollo, Paula Escribano Castaño, Hugo Valenzuela-Garcia, Miranda Jessica Lubbers

The purpose of this paper is to explore the care provision of charity organizations that assist people in situations of economic vulnerability. After analyzing central theoretical…

Administering solidarity: grassroots welfare in post-debt crisis Greece

Russell Henshaw

The purpose of this paper is to examine what happens as the state relinquishes welfare provision to volunteers. Attending to the ethnographic reality of such practices, to the…

Doing good with food: Food aid volunteers’ understanding of food access issues

Ioana Daniela Ionita

The purpose of this paper is to explore food access issues as tackled by an association that runs a week-end soup kitchen in a social welfare center in Bucharest, Romania. The…

Profit, poverty and public care: austerity’s charity work

Gemma Lord

The purpose of this paper is to explore empirically the dynamics by which austerity, a “moment” of neoliberal policy reform enacted through strategies of market-driven governance…

Ambiguous spaces: the charity-NGO nexus in Iceland

James Gordon Rice, Anna Wojtyńska

The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study which analyses the ambiguous relationship that Icelandic charities and NGOs have with the formal social welfare services they…

Religious social action and its organizational profiles: Study conducted in the context of southern European welfare states

Angel Belzunegui-Eraso, David Duenas-Cid, Inma Pastor-Gosálbez

Social action implemented by the Church via its affiliated entities, foundations and associations may be viewed as a uniform activity. In reality, however, several organizational…

We can help, but there’s a catch: Nonprofit organizations and access to government-funded resources among the poor

Andreja Siliunas, Mario L. Small, Joseph Wallerstein

Today, low-income people seeking resources from the federal government must often work through non-profit organizations. The purpose of this paper is to examine the constraints…