Looking Good and Doing Good

American corporations give away several billion dollars a year to a range of philanthropic causes with the hope of improving their public images among consumers, employees, and the general public. They certainly don't try to be political or controversial. Nonetheless corporate philanthropy has come under fire in recent years, especially from the Right, because of grants to Planned Parenthood, Hispanic groups, innovative art, and liberal public policy groups. "Looking Good and Doing Good" examines why corporate philanthropy has become politicized, how corporations respond to controversy about their donations, and what the conflicts tell us about corporate philanthropy and corporate politics.Himmelstein argues that corporate giving sometimes becomes politicized because it is inherently a complex social and political act. He thus uses political controversy as a lens through which to closely examine corporate philanthropy. Drawing on in-depth interviews with managers at 55 of the largest corporate giving programs in the U.S., the book develops three main arguments. First, corporate giving often finds itself, as one manager put it, locked in a struggle between looking good and doing good. That is, rather than being a simple assertion of either corporate interest or philanthropic benevolence, it bears a complicated, contradictory relationship to the corporation.Second, no corporate giving program is an island. Individual programs are embedded in an extensive network of inter-corporate relations and participate in a culture of corporate philanthropy. This culture consists of a shared set of understandings about how philanthropy can serve corporate interests, to whom donations should be made, and how giving programs should be orgainzed. Third, although ostensibly apolitical and nonideological, corporate philanthropy is part of corporate politics in the broad sense, the way that large corporations manage their relationships to government and to other major institutions. It is implicit in it is a broad understanding of the place of large corporations in American society and a strategy for securing that place.