Rethinking Charitable Actions: Identifying the New Characteristics of Social Solidarity

The thesis includes four main chapters. Each of these chapters tackles with specific hypotheses and theoretical debates, yet they are all anchored in an overarching question: how can we better comprehend the changing values and domains of social solidarityin charities? The first chapter introduces a theoretical discussion to go beyond the conventional contrast between altruism and self-interest in understanding charitable action. The chapter focuses on how the citizens of the Western nation-states build their social resilience through strategic prosocial actions. The second chapter develops and validates a scale to conceptualise the market-driven and socially-driven values of volunteering, using a web-based online survey instrument along with onlineresearch subjects. It presents empirical evidence that people intend to volunteer at a certain type of voluntary organisation because of their socially-driven and market-driven values. The development of a new scale combining the two furthers our understandings of the relationship between values and motivations in volunteering. The third chapter examines the relationship between identity and donation behaviour, more specifically how the implicit activation of national and global identities by lab experimental manipulations alters donation behaviour towards national and international charities. The experimental findings conclude that identity-priming does not significantlyexplainmonetary contributions to both type of charities. The final chapter turns to the currently prevailing goal-oriented discourses in charitable actions: boosting own skills for employment or helping thecommunity. Using experimental manipulations, designed as different charity appeals specifically addressing university students, I try to findout to what extent these discourses are mediated by social value orientation (SVO) (prosocialvsindividualistic).The results demonstrate that individualistic value orientation increases not only the effect of the discourse of boosting skills for employment but also the discourse of helping the community). Prosocial-orientation on the other hand increasesonlythe effect ofthe community-oriented discourse.