My First Book!

My interests in social inequality, social problems, culture, and charitable giving are reflected in the recently published Unequal Partnerships: Beyond the Rhetoric of Philanthropic Collaboration (Routledge, 2006).  This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the hierarchical relationship between foundations and the organizations they fund.  It investigates community-based organizations’ strategic attempts to assert influence over foundation funding priorities.  The book draws upon several years of research about comprehensive community initiatives undertaken by foundations in cities across the U.S. during the 1980s and 1990s; initiatives that aimed to give community-based organizations unprecedented access to foundations’ purse strings.  A chief dilemma built into these initiatives is that they aimed to be collaborative even while foundations maintained a vested interest in gate-keeping the kinds of neighborhood revitalization reforms that community-based organizations received grants to undertake.  Ironically, it is precisely because these purported “partnerships” required sponsors to cede some of their funding power that the initiatives enabled foundations to retain control over the kinds of antipoverty programs community-based organizations pursued.

New Research

My current project is on disaster relief.  I am exploring the logic, goals, and consequences of individuals and institutions making charitable contributions in the wake of natural disasters that have captured national media attention.  The study compares the charitable responses to Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean Tsunami.  It is valuable to look at these two disasters side by side since they both received massive news coverage and consequently elicited the two largest disaster relief campaigns to date.  At the same time, different lessons can be learned from the Hurricane (a domestic disaster) and the Tsunami (an international disaster).

This project aims to call into question the popular conventional wisdom that those disasters which enter the media spotlight are necessarily the most deserving of our sympathy and charitable support.  I am investigating why the Hurricane and the Tsunami fueled such massive relief campaigns whereas the everyday social problems which afflict the very same populations as those victimized by these natural disasters receive comparatively little philanthropic support.  The practical value of this study is that it can make donors aware that perhaps they ought to view natural disasters as opportunities for addressing not just an immediate set of dire humanitarian needs but also the underlying social problems these disasters make visible.

Writing

Mary-Ellen Boyle and I are working on an article about how corporate advertising contributes toward shaping public understandings of poverty.

Editorial Work

I have just finished editing a book of readings to be used for introductory social problems courses.  This book will be published in 2007 by W.W. Norton.

I have just become the Social Stratification Section Editor for Sociology Compass, a new peer-reviewed online journal from Blackwell Publishers that will launch in 2007.