Introduction
In their study "The American University," published in 1974, Talcott Parsons and Gerald M. Platt subjected the structure, function, and evolution of the US university system to an analysis in terms of an action theoretical framework. According to the authors, the university as a modern institution appears as an organizational crystallization of an encompassing socio-cultural structure, which they call the “cognitive complex.” From an evolutionary perspective, the cognitive complex is the result of processes of differentiation, interpenetration, and structural couplings into which resources of the general action system flow so that they can be institutionalized at the level of the social system. In the light of this theoretical perspective, the modern university appears as an organizational form that encompasses knowledge, rationality, research and teaching, the willingness to expect cognitive learning, professional competence, and the medium intelligence as a generalized resource of the general action system.
I would like to argue that the sociological concept of “complex” has the potential to enrich the inclusion-theoretically oriented theory of world society. Analogous studies, like Parsons’ and Platts on the “American University”, would be conceivable: If one extends the action-theoretical framework broadly enough (as Parsons did it in his later work), this could, in my opinion, result in fruitful intellectual reconstructions of some debates that still dominate sociology up to this date, e.g., the seemingly never-ending controversies surrounding “capitalism” (Harris & Delanty, 2023) or the “state” (Evans, Rueschemeyer & Skocpol, eds., 1990). Parsons and Platt themselves hint at the emerging perspective: “the university has spearheaded the educational revolution, perhaps in ways comparable to those in which highly efficient firms spearheaded the mature phases of the industrial revolution.” (Parsons & Platt, 1974, p. 6) In this way, the modern democratically constituted state could also be understood as the institutional “spearhead” of a political-administrative complex that has entered the wake of the democratic inclusion revolution.
Philanthropy as an evolutionary universal
In keeping with such an inclusion-theoretical research program, I imagine the modern form of the “foundation” as an organizational crystallization of the philanthropic complex.
This is linked to the conviction that the system of philanthropic foundations has become a single, important factor in the development of the structure of modern society. The value of charitable activity lies in its voluntary nature, which is why it is highly valued in the "civil sphere" (Alexander, 2006) of modern society.
From a comparative sociological perspective, philanthropy appears as an “evolutionary universal” (Parsons, 1964). As early as the 5th century BC, essential characteristics of philanthropic activity can be identified that will fundamentally shape the philanthropic complex of the modern era. Even in the time of Homer and Hesiod, humane thinking and behavior were caught in the tension between inclusion and exclusion, because this “does not usually extend indiscriminately to all people, but only to certain groups” (Ritter & Gründer, eds., 1989, p. 543). Furthermore, philanthropic action, regardless of how inclusive it is intended, has always been closely linked to the structures of social inequality: Who can feel entitled to deign to act philanthropically? What advantages, e.g., in terms of status and prestige, does such engagement offer the ancient philanthropist? Philanthropists thus belong to the diverse group of "influential people," to whom high social prestige is positively attributed.
The social fact of philanthropy, as can be determined so far, must be deeply anchored in the general system of action in order to ultimately result in a socio-cultural complex, characterized by diverse boundary relationships and structural couplings with the various, increasingly differentiated and autonomous subsystems of society that has emerged since the mid-18th century. Analogous to the medium “intelligence” as a generalized resource of the cognitive complex, I would like to propose, following the media theory of Talcott Parsons (1969, 1975), that the generalized medium “affect” should be considered as such a resource for the philanthropic complex.
The appearance of the philanthropic complex in the leading medium of affect
At first glance, the social system reference of affect may seem somewhat strange, as Parsons himself notes when he refers to a controversy with Victor Lidz, Mark Gould and Dean Gerstein, who opted to anchor the medium primarily at the level of the personality system. Parsons strongly disagrees and conceptualizes affect as a “generalized medium most definitely concerned with the mobilization and control of the factors of solidarity in Durkheim's sense.” (Parsons, 1975, p. 109) This includes, firstly, the cathectic commitments that people undertake to participate in various associations, groups, social movements, and organizations in the civil sphere of society. Furthermore, values and standards that are fed from moral sources are incorporated. Finally, individual and collective philanthropic actors are required to be able to provide rational reasons for their respective “affective budgets,” since this resource must ultimately be allocated between potentially competing obligations to the civil sphere. In addition, a further problem of affect allocation arises when multiple memberships and role performances within the various associations and organizations of functional systems such as politics, law, business, science, family, art, sport, etc. have to be taken into account.
One can speak of a complete differentiation and autonomy of this range of functional systems of society when, as Rudolf Stichweh (2009, p. 29) states, "the membership status of individuals is communicatively considered and ensured ... following the example of 'citizenship' or organizational affiliation.” The philanthropic complex of modern society (like, e.g., the cognitive complex, which Parsons and Platt analyzed) presupposes such inclusion processes, just as it itself is capable of mediating and promoting inclusion, for example, through the socio-cultural and organizational form of the philanthropic foundation.
Development lines of organized philanthropy and the problem of poverty
In the stratified societies of the Christian-Latin Middle Ages, as early as the 5th century, “the meaning of the originally ancient pagan term philanthropy largely coincides with the meaning of the Christian term agape.” (Ritter & Gründer, eds., 1989, p. 547) From a comparative perspective, religion, as Stichweh (2021, p. 20) quite rightly points out, takes on the role of a pioneer in the history of inclusion revolutions. (Of course, the possibility of the individual decision to exclude oneself from the church had existed theoretically at the expense of being officially punished as a heretic and therefore of running the risk of excommunication). For philanthropy, there was no real alternative other than to fit into the inclusionary pull of “Christianitas,” which was particularly evident in how the phenomenon of poverty was viewed. Following Kate Crassons (2010), Stichweh states: “Therefore, it became very important for rich people to give a significant portion of their property to institutions that helped the poor and indigent.”
In her exploratory sketch of philanthropic inclusions, Evelyn Moser (2020, pp. 308-313) demonstrates that the social form of the foundation received a significant boost as early as the Christian Middle Ages, thus establishing inclusion and role structures "that have left their mark on today's forms of organized philanthropy." (Moser, 2020, p. 309) The historian Michael Borgolte (ed., 2014, 2016, 2017) has initiated an international comparative research program on foundations in medieval societies and has identified a specific form of influence in the context of religion for Latin Christianity. This appears to be the subsystem of the stratified society that offered the greatest possible opportunities for inclusion and, with the transcendent doctrine of salvation, offered a concept according to which “the individual postmortal salvation of the soul in the afterlife could be positively influenced by targeted actions and prayers in this world.” (Moser, 2020, p. 309) Based on this otherworldly meta-purpose of medieval foundations, philanthropic action could take concrete form along the lines of the medieval understanding of poverty. Both following the inclusionary relationships of this form of society and stabilizing them in turn, a relationship of influence between the donor and God emerged in the form of an exchange of gifts, elevated to the transcendent: “God – or Christ – was thus seen as the recipient of the gifts and owed the donor his remembrance in return.” (Borgolte, 2014a, p. 20) Although foundations and their clerical beneficiaries were important actors with their performance roles, they rarely generated new structures, but rather helped to stabilize the existing order and thus the inclusion conditions of the stratified society within the framework of their minimal scope of action.
In the 18th century, more precisely since around 1750, the structures of the stratified society began to falter, which was reflected in the fact that the emerging functional systems began to include more and more members of society. (Stichweh, 2021, p. 19) The philanthropic complex also significantly expanded its social reach in the second half of the 18th century, as the educational reform movement of philanthropy gave it new programmatic impetus. (Ritter & Gründer, eds., 1989, p. 548) At the beginning of the modern era, three major inclusion revolutions began to take hold: the industrial revolution, the democratic revolution, and the educational revolution. (Parsons & Platt, 1974, p. 1; Parsons, 1971) The example of the changing role of the poor clearly illustrates the transition from a stratified to a more and more functionally differentiated society. With the programs of social discipline, needs were examined, categorized and hierarchized. Accordingly and in direct correlation with the institutions of police regulations, education, class morality and many others (Stichweh, 2009, p. 29) “common good oriented foundations and police [the old German term "policey," which means princely laws of the early modern period] foundations” emerged, which supported charitable measures for beggars in accordance with and in addition to the administration of the cities. Religion is no longer the functional guiding system that provides orientation and legitimacy to philanthropic engagement: "Poverty was no longer seen as a condition ordained by God, but rather as a problem for public order, which initially manifested itself primarily in the cities and demanded treatment and, ideally, abolition." (Moser, 2020, p. 314; Luhmann, 1997, p. 623)
The environmental conditions that the philanthropic complex faces in the beginning modern era have radically changed: complex interpenetrations and structural couplings take the place of the guiding systemic orientation towards religion in the old stratified societies. Philanthropic engagement and its organizational form, the foundation, are facing new evolutionary challenges: if influence is to be exerted at various levels of society within a range that corresponds to the statutory decision-making premises of foundations, it requires, for example, orientation towards the political systems’ contingency formula of the “common good” (Luhmann 2002, p. 120), economic financialization, legal capacity, cooperation with other actors of an increasingly self-confident civil society, sustainable internal administrative and organizational structures, and generally the creation of a stable basis of legitimacy vis-à-vis the diverse environments of society. (Goeke & Moser, 2021) In fact, it can be said that the philanthropic complex, which in the Federal Republic of Germany alone has up to now differentiated itself into more than 20,000 foundations, is not only increasingly better equipped economically, but is also pursuing increasingly ambitious objectives with regard to its influence on the civil sphere of modern society through the organizational form of the foundation.
Theory construction options
At this point, a theoretical and conceptual clarification seems necessary. In my opinion, Talcott Parsons did himself no favors by calling the integrative subsystem of the social system a "societal community." Sociologists with a penchant for paradoxes may find this term appealing. Far more profitable, in contrast, is likely to be the research program of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory, which has authored clearly defined individual studies on the functional systems of economy, politics, law, intimate relationships, education, art, science, and religion. (In addition to many detailed individual studies, the concise overview in Luhmann, 1986, is instructive.) Nevertheless, the central problem of the research program established by Parsons regarding the conditions of possibility for the emergence of social order (Parsons, 1937) remained a challenge to sociological theory formation even after Luhmann. Starting with studies on differentiation and autonomy and then with broad analyses of social structure and social inequality under the guiding paradigms of inclusion and exclusion, Rudolf Stichweh made Luhmann's research program compatible with theoretical currents that do not necessarily base the genesis of a world society solely on systems theory. With Stichweh, Talcott Parsons's basic question can be formulated more precisely as follows: How can the social dimension of communication be formulated under the paradigmatic figures of membership, solidarity and mass disciplining with the key distinction between inclusion and exclusion? In fact, this would be the location for the integrative subsystem of the social system, designated with “I” in Parsons’ famous AGIL scheme and located in the northeast quadrant of the it. Parsons tried to solve the problem by amalgamating Ferdinand Tönnies’s ideal typical model variables “community” and “society” to form the “societal community.” However, can a “societal community” be a subsystem of society (sic!) analogous to, for example, economics and politics? Hardly!
I would therefore like to suggest incorporating Jeffrey C. Alexander's (2006) approach of the "civil sphere" into the inclusion theory research program. In modern times, inclusion means embracing the basic institution of the individual, both in its unity and in its microdiversity, in the various functional subsystems of society. (Stichweh & Ahlers, 2021, pp. 209-210) Alexander (2006, p. 33) shows the problem that inclusions are always confronted with in modern times: “When the domination of one sphere over another, or the monopolization of resources by elites within the individual spheres themselves, has been forcefully blocked, it has been by bringing to bear the cultural codes and regulatory institutions of the civil sphere.” However, any analyses of the philanthropic complex and the foundation organizations of transformative philanthropy that comprise it must under no circumstances fall short of the theoretical framework established by Talcott Parsons: “The main guiding line of the analysis is the concept that a complex social system consists of a network of interdependent and interpenetrating subsystems, each of which, seen at the appropriate level of reference, is a social system in its own right, subject to all the functional exigencies of any such system relative to its institutionalized culture and situation and possessing all the essential structural components, organized on the appropriate levels of differentiation and specification.” (Parsons, 1961, p. 44) If one frees sociological theory formation from many of the rigidities of AGIL schematism, the concept of the civil sphere seems to me very suitable for enriching the theory of global social inclusions and exclusions.
The civil sphere, the problem of the legitimacy of philanthropic action, and influence action as role category
The philanthropic complex is interwoven with the civil sphere. Individual actors (e.g., intellectuals, opinion leaders, social movements spokespersons, etc.) and organizations (e.g., philanthropic foundations, NGOs, etc.) exert their influence on businesses, and political parties, and public opinion, by making use of the cultural codes, motives, and relationship patterns (Alexander, 2006, pp. 57-58) of the civil sphere. Jeffrey C. Alexander emphasizes that any fruitful analysis of social divisions and lines of conflict, of inclusions and exclusions, must establish a connection to the civil symbolic sphere: "We must recognize and focus on the distinctive symbolic codes that are critically important in constituting the very sense of society for those who are within and without it." (Alexander, 2006, p. 54) A sufficiently complex and differentiated theory of the organizational form “foundation” as a driving force for “transformative philanthropy” is well advised to place “the issue of legitimacy and the challenge to generate and maintain legitimacy” (Goeke & Moser, 2021, p. 20) in the context of a philanthropic complex that is in boundary and interpenetration relationships with both the civil sphere of society and its functional systems.
Generally speaking, Rudolf Stichweh (2009, p. 32) distinguishes between two categories of roles of “institutionalized individualism” (Parsons, 1970, p. 67) in modern global society: performance roles and audience roles. If one places the analysis of transformative philanthropy in the context of this theoretical framework, then another important role category could be added that characterizes actions in the civil sphere in a special way, namely “influence action”. In this sense foundations appear as actors in the civil sphere: "They do, in fact, make commitments of the association's name beyond the level of explicit authorization ... In so doing, they add to the net amount of influence circulating in the system and have an effect on the distribution of commitments in the society in the direction of promoting the 'causes' they hold to be desirable." (Parsons, 1963, p. 62)
In their study of transformative philanthropy, which draws on organization theory, Pascal Goeke & Evelyn Moser (2021, p. 20) emphasize that if foundations want to be socially effective, they must construct a position, for example, on issues of the common good, in order to then be able to adequately justify their legitimacy vis-à-vis their social environments. Organized philanthropy can act as an "inclusion amplifier" when, for example, philanthropically supported influence is used to counteract the ascriptive disadvantages of students who would otherwise be excluded in the political and educational systems. (Parsons & White, 1961) Philanthropically exerted influence by one or more units of the philanthropic complex can then help to establish new consensuses between functional units in the various subsystems of society by working to balance the justification of the distribution of rights and duties, expected performances and rewards in the sense of the common interest in expanding opportunities for inclusion. The philanthropic complex of modern society contributes to the constant balancing of the ever-precarious relationship between “facts and norms” (Habermas, 1992) by mediating the inclusion value of the institutionalization of equal opportunities with the factual functional needs of competence, productivity, collective performance and, in general, social responsibility. In the philanthropic complex, diffuse fiduciary “anti-professions” can be institutionalized because the profit motive inherent in the typical professions has been largely neutralized by the prior transfer of assets to, for example, foundation funds. Therefore, foundations are often able to pursue long-term interests and transformative agendas, which can be effectively implemented whenever they are congruent with the more short-term perspectives and interests of, for example, the political-administrative system.
Under this condition, the philanthropic complex gains its high strategic-functional importance when a connection between economic capital and social capital can be established. The philanthropic complex is therefore itself inclusive: not only established foundation organizations with comparatively “old” capital operate within it, but it is also open to diverse philanthropic commitments from the various subsystems of society with their outstanding personalities, stars, celebrities, officials and opinion leaders. The position of organized philanthropy or individual actors within the philanthropic complex is reflected in the structure of social inequality, i.e., in the class and stratification system of society. Here, the degree of validity of philanthropic engagement is measured by its ability to influence elites and public opinion. (Parsons, 1971, pp. 10-16) At this point I would like to take up a suggestion from Talcott Parsons (1969, p. 437), who speaks of an “influence market” in which various interpenetrating collectivities meet: “Indeed it seems justified to set forth the hypothesis that the quantitative dimension of influence should be defined by the scope of the interpenetrating channels within which influence can be exercised on the one hand and from which it can be drawn on the other. This suggests that he who has the highest prestige among a set is he who can exert his influence in the widest range of different collective subsystems, and who can draw on the resources of such a range – which in both cases involve varying proportions of the factors and products.” Empirical case studies would demonstrate how the factor and product bundles of solidarity commitments are packed up together within the philanthropic complex in order to achieve success in the form of opinion leadership and prestige in the various influence markets of both the civil sphere and the various social subsystems of society with the aim of accumulating corresponding social capital. In fact, this is the Achilles heel of the actions of philanthropic foundation organizations: on the one hand, they try to exert influence both in the civil sphere and on elite communications and program design in the various functional systems of society. At the same time, however, foundations, as carriers of transformative agendas, find themselves in the crosshairs of the civil sphere: they have to legitimize themselves, both with regard to the origin of their financial resources and with regard to their objectives in politics, business, art, education, science, etc.
The example of the Bertelsmann Foundation
In neoliberal regimes of capital accumulation (Slobodian, 2020, Bierbricher, 2021) some philanthropic foundations play a dark role as wolf in sheep's clothing. Without going into the empirical details here I nevertheless want to mention one German example. The Bertelsmann Foundation has enormous resources at its disposal. Founded in 1977, it indirectly holds approximately 77 percent of the shares of Bertelsmann media company. This allows it not only to employ over 300 people but also to enjoy extensive media coverage through the broadcasters and print media Bertelsmann controls. Because the controlling Mohn family transferred approximately three-quarters of Bertelsmann shares to the foundation, it also likely saved a good two billion euros in inheritance and gift tax. With its annual budget of approximately 60 million euros and a total volume of all its projects since 1977 of approximately 800 million euros, the Bertelsmann Foundation is thus de facto working with public money, without having to answer to any executive or judicial branch.
With the instrumentalization of a philanthropic foundation - a kind of non-profit Research and Development Departement - the Bertelsmann corporation succeeds in presenting itself to civil society as a responsible owner committed to the common good, one that is “regularly audited by the tax office” without any complaints, and as allegedly independent of the corporation and politically neutral. The fact that the Bertelsmann Foundation succeeds in appearing as an ideal overall democrat is one of the peculiarities of a politico-neoliberal regime in which a corporate foundation has succeeded in neutralizing the "political" through business science and thus, in a perfidious reinterpretation of Articles 14 and 15 of the constitution [the German Grundgesetz] ("Property entails obligations" and the possibility of transferring it to "common ownership"), in the guise of philanthropic ideals as the advocate of the "democratic" per se and in earning a lot of money as a service provider from the foundation's orchestrated marketing of political-governmental processes - from private public partnerships and new public management.
The gradual erosion of democratic politics by business requirements like benchmarking, by control with economic indices and indicators as well as by management by competition lies in the most characteristic interest of the Bertelsmann corporation, which offer appropriate planning and evaluation equipments, for example for the local government policy and the municipal administration as well as for health and education institutions (hospitals, schools and universities). The company group attached media (e.g., the television stations of the RTL Group and the publishing power of Penguin Books) manufacture thereby a distorted public opinion which pay homage to the cult of productivism and individualism and squints spellbound on the next rankings.
The philanthropic complex is observed and constantly critically questioned in its various societal boundary relationships by those actors in the civil sphere who hold social roles of influence, performance and audience. The example of the neoliberal Bertelsmann Foundation shows that civil sphere criticism of this actor of the philanthropic complex seems absolutely appropriate.
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