Help for Heroes: From organizational discourse to a new orthodoxy

British Politics

In modern day Britain, the discourse of national heroification is routinely utilised by politicians, educationalists, and cultural industry professionals, whilst also being a popular concept to describe deserving 'do-gooders' who contribute to British society in a myriad of ways. We argue that although this heroification discourse is enacted as a discursive devise of encouraging politically and morally desirable behaviour, it is dissociated from the largely under-explored facets of contemporary popular heroism. To compensate for this gap, this paper explores public preferences for heroes using survey data representative of British adults. This analysis demonstrates a conceptual stretching in the understanding of heroism, and allows identifying age-and gender-linked dynamics which effect public choices of heroes. In particular, we demonstrate that age above all determines the preference for having a hero, but does not explain preferences for specific hero-types. The focus on gender illustrates that the landscape of popular heroism reproduces a male-dominated bias which exists in the wider political and cultural heroification discourse. Simultaneously, our study shows that if national heroificiation discourse in Britain remains male-centric, the landscape of popular heroism is characterised by a gendered trend towards privatisation of heroes being particularly prominent among women. In the conclusion, this paper argues for a conceptual revision and re-gendering of the national heroification discourse as a step towards both empirically grounded, and ageand gender sensitive politics of heroes and heroines.

Armed Forces & Society, 2006

An important feature of civil-military relations is the way in which states recognize the sacrifices that the men and women of the armed forces give to their country and provide care and support for them and their families once they leave the military as veterans. Yet states differ not only in the levels and kinds of support provided for ex-service personnel but also in their very definition of what a veteran is. This article examines the case of the United Kingdom from an international perspective. It explains how and why the United Kingdom has developed a particular-and inclusive-definition of veteran and, in conjunction with veterans interest groups, a strategy for allocating scarce resources to this group. The article analyzes attempts to mitigate the effects of social exclusion suffered by some subgroups within the veteran population, although the great majority does well at least in terms of short-term employment prospects. It concludes with an analysis of the dilemmas that are likely to confront those responsible for developing policy on veterans issues in the future, especially where to target scarce resources in such an inclusively defined group of the population.

War and Society, 2008

Nobody has yet tried to count the full value of the immense outpouring of generosity, the multitude of sacrifices the War has called forth. Nobody is able to count it.' W.E.Dowding 1 This article is a belated attempt to prove Dowding's comment wrong. It seeks to measure the extent of the financial and human resources mobilised by non-uniformed voluntary action in support of Britain's war effort. It also seeks to determine the effect this had upon existing charitable causes and to ascertain some basic facts about the class composition of charity activists. Though some details about First World War charities are quite widely known, knowledge tends to be anecdotal and unsystematic. There has been no attempt to calculate how extensive fundraising was, how many volunteers gave their time or from which strata of society they came. The usual suggestion is that the majority of charity workers were upper and middle-class women and that the overall impact of charity, in terms of building the social capital that helped win the war, was less significant than other activities such as uniformed volunteering or other women's war work. Yet when the facts are examined this view is, at best, a partial and distorted one. BACKGROUND That there was a massive outpouring of charitable effort on the outbreak of war in 1914 is widely acknowledged. What is less clear is how this activity related to the prewar charitable context and to responses in the most recent conflicts in which Britain had been engaged, most notably the Crimean and South African wars.

Historical Journal of Film Radio and TV , 2018

Fundraising for charitable causes has had a key place in the BBC’s schedule since the earliest days of the corporation and the establishment of the weekly radio appeal. As new forms of fundraising through high-profile media events developed in the 1980s, raising unprecedentedly large sums for charity, the BBC had to adjust the way it negotiated with good causes and audiences. These changes coincided with professionalization and rapid growth of the NGO sector, which sought to elicit funds from a wider public using innovative techniques and new ways of reaching out through the media. This article uses internal BBC documents to examine how, against this rapidly changing background, the organization navigated the rules behind broadcasting of appeals. This includes the way that the BBC interacted with the Disasters Emergency Committee that had been established in the 1960s to provide an interface between broadcasters and charities to oversee exceptional fundraising for international causes. In some cases, the BBC faced difficulties in reconciling its duty to educate audiences about charitable causes with the fundraising imperative which relied on TV extravaganzas. In other cases, the BBC confronted the question of whether it was hosting a global fundraising event or simply covering an event organized by others. These kinds of emerging challenges which arose out of new innovations in fundraising via broadcasting produced interesting debates that are still evolving both within the charitable sector and in the way it relates to the media. The BBC’s role within this ecology provides some illuminating insights about the issues connected with raising funds for humanitarian causes.

Andrea Pető, ed., Gender: War. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan, 2017

From the Napoleonic Wars onward, the cult of war heroes was fundamental in establishing and preserving modern nation-states and their all-male conscription armies. Real and imagined war heroes served as cornerstones of national mythologies and self-images, and heroes altered depending on the nature of historical challenges in different countries and periods. The worship of male warriors as national icons—most poignantly in Nazi Germany but also elsewhere—was accompanied by the polarization of gender order, whereas more moderate versions of martial masculinity have better allowed for a middle ground between the sexes. It remains to be seen how new ‘‘cults of war heroism’’ might appear in the future, now that women occupy a much more central place in politics and in the armed forces. In the rearview mirror of history, the first half of the twentieth century stands out as the heyday of European nationalism and totalitarianism. The age of the world wars, when whole age cohorts of young men were sent to annihilate each other and die for their country, now seems distant. Yet clearly this potential for aggressive violence and altruistic sacrifice does not entirely belong to the past; the cult of war heroism may have lost its topical relevance for defining male citizenship, but it has not lost its appeal altogether. A look at the plethora of war movies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the idolization of Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara (1928–1967), the celebration of national anniversaries, or the cult of martyrdom in terrorist organizations reveals the continuous attraction of linking heroic masculinity with armed struggle—and contemporary professional armies still emphasize heroic role models in motivating the ranks. The changing content and varying forms of military heroes and heroism reflect historical changes and power balances, but the study of war heroism—as well as its frictions and failures—always remains a study of more wide-ranging collective identities, self-images, and gender politics, regardless of the era.

Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing, 2022

Recent decades have witnessed growing popularity in embodied philanthropy, where participants undertake various types of publicly displayed bodily labour in support of their respective causes. The fundraising potential of such efforts reached extraordinary heights during Sir Captain Thomas Moore's "Walk for the National Health Service,” wherein the 99‐year‐old World War II veteran walked laps of his garden to raise funds during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Within less than a month “Captain Tom” raised over £30 million, the highest amount ever by an individual charity walker. To better understand the social and cultural drivers behind Moore's incredible popularity this article applies Julie Robert's theoretical framework of embodied philanthropy, exploring the multivalent semiotic potential that Moore radiated through his age, disability, military adornments, Yorkshire grit, and unfailingly positive, aphoristic style of speaking. During a time of global crisis, this distinct array of bodily affordances enabled Captain Tom to simultaneously serve as an honest broker, teacher, exemplar, rallying figure, and ultimately martyr. Such practices of sacrificial citizenship, however, raise troubling questions, particularly in relation to expectations that fellow citizens should likewise stoically uphold civic-minded resilience during times of crisis. Furthermore, while the potential benefits can prove extraordinarily impactful, organizations should exercise care in too readily attaching themselves to particular causes, lest they become complicit in contentious agendas or even inadvertently mislead donors.

This paper asks whether the expansion of celebrity involvement in charitable and humanitarian issues in Northern Europe and the US might be a comparable historical phenomenon to the philanthropic endeavours of prominent C19th persons. It notes that the conspicuous nature of star philanthropy in both Victorian times and the present are fairly dramatic in comparison to that of the mid twentieth century, when the welfare state and the New Deal were at their peak: a welfare-oriented era which, to some, now increasingly looks like an 'historical blip'. It asks whether the rise of contemporary celebrity involvement in charity can therefore be explained in terms of the contemporary political conjuncture, inasmuch as celebrities could be understood as individuals with large amounts of private capital seeking to intervene in -and gain forms of power through -involvement in humanitarian and charitable causes that might have formerly been the job of the state. Can celebrity involvement in charity be explained in these terms? Does the marriage of celebrity and charity today take a neoliberal form, one that parallels the liberal form of C19th interventions, bequests and donations? And what might the key differences between forms of spectacular 'philanthrocapitalism' in these eras (particularly the contemporary insistence on the confessional and intimate modes of address) reveal about its workings, its internal traditions and about the specificity of our own age? This paper draws on contemporary media discourse, debate in the voluntary sector, historical scholarship and Foucault's distinctions between liberalism and neoliberalism to argue that whereas 'celanthropy' in the Victorian period eventually came to contribute to the welfare state, today it is more involved in privatising and dismantling it.

This paper is a response to Raymond Williams’ seminal work on Keywords (1976) and uses his approach to examine, stimulate and also challenge current debates about charity, philanthropy and voluntarism in the context of Austerity Britain. It also uses theoretical commentary from Habermas on the Lifeworld, the State and the Market and includes a discussion on civil society and associationism. The primary consideration in the paper is to examine and problematize these words, underpinned by a desire to consider their usage – politically and socially - in a period when poverty and inequality in the United Kingdom has reached new heights. Poverty has become a loaded word ideologically, in the Austerity world of the UK, arguably demonising the poor. In the 2015 election campaign it was used only once by the then-Labour leader Ed Miliband and only in the context of benefits by David Cameron, whose rhetoric presupposes a moral failure in those who find themselves living in poverty. Yet it is a major scourge of our times and the renewed emphasis on charity, philanthropy and voluntarism, and the retreat from state provision, is profoundly political in the context of real and widespread poverty and growing inequality. The paper examines historical responses to poverty through charity, philanthropy and voluntarism, reflecting on the uses of these words in the context of the Poor Law, medieval to 19th century, the Charity Organisation Societies, the University Settlement Movement, Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s Extension Ladder model, which distinguished different roles for the state and for voluntary action, the evolution of the Welfare State and the fight for rights, not charity. It brings the debate up to date with a discussion about philanthrocapitalism and the Big Society and the renewed interest in charity, voluntarism (particularly as volunteering) and philanthropy encapsulated in current government rhetoric and ideology. It also explores potential ways forward for the voluntary sector.

This essay is an analysis of international NGO fundraising posters on Underground advertising spaces in London. The argument of this paper is that what is essential to the economic success of charity appeals is the existence of a culturally maintained repertoire of subjective values, like altruism, benevolence and compassion. In the current market-based discourse of philanthropy, these values are made productive and fundraising posters reinforce the role of commodity consumption as an effective means to channel these disinterested values. The fundamental assumption behind this essay is that NGO fundraising practices are intimately linked to practices of humanitarian intervention: through the lens of Appadurai’s theoretical framework on disjunctive global flows, we shall place the images and values associated with fundraising posters in the broader context of humanitarianism under neoliberal capitalism. Next, we shall take three fundraising posters that were circulated in London as case material, and finally we will use Tarde’s early theory of ‘psychological economics’ as an alternative perspective to assess the immaterial economic value of values such as compassion, benevolence and altruism that these posters promote and construct.

With Dr. Nick Webber, BCU. Harry Patch (1898-2009) was the last surviving soldier to have fought in the trenches of the Western Front, entering the media spotlight in 1998 when approached to contribute to the BBC documentary Veterans. Media coverage of Patch and the cultivation of his totemic status was particularly prodigious in anticipating and marking his death, producing a range of reflections on its historical, social and cultural significance. Focused on the British popular press, this article examines media coverage of the last decade of Patch’s life. It considers the way in which the Great War is memorialised in the space of public history of the media in terms of the personalisation and sentimentalisation of Patch, exploring how he serves as a synecdoche for the millions of others who fought, embodies ideas of generational and social change, and how the iconography of the Great War’s contemporaneous representation works in the space of its memorialisation. http://mwc.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/11/04/1750635214557988.abstract Video abstract: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR4uDnoXJ69lFTn_OKAW-yA/videos