The Organizational Gift and Sociological Approaches to Exchange
This paper studies the specific form of gift-giving behavior in which an organization, or a set of organizations, intervenes between the donor and the donee. It is suggested that this should be called an organizational gift, or “organic gift”. Following Richard Titmuss’ insights, the first part considers what happens in the domain of biomedicine, examining here what is meant by a “gift” in the case of organ transplantation, in contrast to the Maussian conceptualization of gift-giving behavior. The second part elaborates this finding, and delineates the main characteristics of this modern form of gift, entailing the presence of organizations in the absence of which the donor and the donee could neither give nor receive. The final part broaden the perspective, including a review of Karl Polanyi’s conception of eciprocity as an integrative form of economic activity, providing a new way of mapping the forms of exchange which present themselves as alternatives to market exchange in our current market societies.
L’auteur
Philippe Steiner est professeur de sociologie à l’université Paris-Sorbonne et membre de l’Institut universitaire de France. Chercheur au GEMASS, il conduit ses recherches sur la sociologie économique et l’histoire des sciences sociales. Il a récemment publié La transplantation d’organes : un commerce nouveau entre les êtres humains (Gallimard, 2010) et Durkheim and the Birth of Economic Sociology (Princeton university press, 2011).
Le texte
Une première version de ce texte a été présentée lors de la conférence « New Developments in Economic Sociology », organisée par l’université d’Uppsalla, en septembre 2013.
