This special issue considers the contribution social psychology can make to an understanding of the gift, donation and giving as psychosocial phenomena, situated in their social context. Paying particular attention to the social, ideological and cultural meanings that develop around such practices, it aims to consider the ethical, legal and also practical implications surrounding them, as experienced by different social actors with varying, and often competing, interests.

Argument

This special issue considers the contribution social psychology can make to an understanding of the gift, donation and giving as psychosocial phenomena, situated in their social context. Paying particular attention to the social, ideological and cultural meanings that develop around such practices, it aims to consider the ethical, legal and also practical implications surrounding them, as experienced by different social actors with varying, and often competing, interests.

Scholars are invited to consider how various theoretical approaches within social psychology (social identity, social representations, social influence, etc.) can be used to understand different empirical cases of donation, including charitable financial giving, giving of time in volunteering, and the donation of blood, organs and gametes in medical science.

We invite papers addressing the following broad topics concerning the gift, donation and giving: the role of institutional or legal systems, communities, and sociocultural contexts in shaping group and individual behaviours, in the case of different forms of donation; the common and different social responses elicited by different types of donations; the meaning of donation for different social groups, and the relationships between meanings and practices; the promotion of acts of donation and its ideological consequences in terms of social inclusion and social justice; the relations between practices of giving and donation and the construction of community and social identities; the development and challenge of a social psychology of gift, donation and giving through influential theories from elsewhere in social sciences.

Papers based on original research studies as well as conceptual, critical and methodological papers are welcome.

Guest editors

• Juliet Foster (Univ. of Cambridge, UK), Sophie Zadeh (Univ. of Cambridge, UK),
• Marjolaine Doumergue (Univ. Lyon 2, France) & Nikos Kalampalikis (Univ. Lyon 2, France)

Instructions to authors

• before 02/10/2017: authors are invited to send an abstract of 500 words (response 4 weeks later)
• before 27/04/2018: deadline for submission of manuscripts (up to 6,000 words, submitted through the ScholarOne system)
• 15/06/2018: first decisions following peer-review.
• 07/09/2018: submission of revised manuscripts.
• Publication of this special issue is scheduled for early 2019

For questions/submissions, please contact: Juliet Foster (jlf1000@cam.ac.uk) & Nikos Kalampalikis (nikos.kalampalikis@univ-lyon2.fr)