David Horton Smith (Boston College, USA and University of East Anglia) will give a seminar on altruistics/voluntary sector research as a global interdisciplinary field and emerging academic discipline.
David Horton Smith’s paper sketches the development of the organized, interdisciplinary, global field and emerging academic discipline of altruistics, focusing on academic journals and mainly on researcher associations founded since ARNOVA (Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action) in 1971. The author devised the neologism “altruistics” to refer to all the phenomena of our field, individual and collective. Included are philanthropy, the nonprofit sector, third sector, voluntary sector, civil society (sector), social economy, volunteering, associations, and nonprofit organizations, among other topics. David Horton SMITH PhD (Harvard) is one of the world’s leading scholars on the voluntary, nonprofit sector. He is in the UK as Honorary Visiting Professor of Altruistics and Community Engagement at the University of East Anglia in Norwich (as a U.S. Fulbright Commission Senior Specialist Distinguished Lecturer). His academic base is Boston College, in the USA, where he is a Research and Emeritus Professor of Sociology. His research, over nearly 50 years, ranges across the fields of nonprofit organisation, and especially voluntary association, structure and operations, the scope and prevalence of associations across territories, the impact of associations and volunteering, misconduct/ deviance in and by associations, altruism and other influences on volunteering, and defining the terms and concepts of the interdisciplinary nonprofit/altruistics field.
His work spans the disciplines of sociology, social psychology, management and public administration, and occasionally anthropology, social geography, and social work/social policy. Some of his recent work has been with the rapidly developing nonprofit sector in China, where he has academic affiliations with two Beijing universities.
Date: Thursday 9 May
Time: 12.00-1.30pm
Location: Murray Building (Building 58), Room 4121
Tea and coffee will be provided.
For any enquiries, please contact: Dr Charlie Walker – [email protected] or Dr David Clifford – [email protected]