Transparency in Philanthropy: An Analysis of Accountability, Fallacy, and Volunteerism
This book explores how degrees of transparency in philanthropy currently fit with accountability under existing federal law, including applications of quid pro quo economic benefit arguments and stakeholder "rights" theories. The book also analyzes and ultimately rejects the most commonly asserted calls for changing the law to mandate more transparency from foundations, including broad notions of judging accountability and effectiveness, correcting "power asymmetry," foundations’ abilities to affect public good, and simply because doing so is good/moral/pure in its own right. Finally, it advocates that foundations do more to consider ways in which greater voluntary transparency can serve their individual strategic and operational objectives.
Trust and transparency: Accreditation and impact reporting by Canadian charities
This article examines the public reporting of impact, defined as progress towards a charity’s mission and long-term objectives, by Canadian charities through their annual reports. The public reporting behaviour of those accredited under Imagine Canada’s Standards Program is compared with a matched sample of charities that have not sought accreditation. The objective is to explore whether trust-building activities like public disclosures of impact and third-party accreditation are convergent. The study finds that accreditation status correlates with impact measurement and reporting; both trends are linked to organizational size, and accreditation does not appear to be causing charities to increase their disclosures of impact, which suggests that there may be underlying factors driving both behaviours. These findings generally affirm earlier research that correlates organizational size with impact measurement, adding that the effect is weak.Cet article examine comment les associations caritatives canadiennes, dans leurs rapports annuels, rendent compte de leur impact, c’est-à-dire de leur progrès par rapport à leur mission et à leurs objectifs à long terme. Cette étude compare les comptes rendus d’associations accréditées par le Programme de normes d’Imagine Canada avec un échantillon apparié d’associations qui n’ont pas été accréditées. L’objectif est de déterminer s’il y a convergence parmi les démarches entreprises pour gagner la confiance du public telles que l’accréditation par un tiers et la divulgation d’impact. Cette étude observe que les associations accréditées sont plus enclines à mesurer et à divulguer leur impact; que ces deux pratiques sont plus communes dans les grandes associations; et que l’accréditation à elle seule n’entraîne pas forcément les associations caritatives à divulguer leur impact, ce qui suggère que des facteurs sous-jacents sont peut-être responsables pour les deux pratiques. En général, ces conclusions confirment des recherches antérieures trouvant une corrélation entre la grandeur d’un organisme et le désir de mesurer son impact, bien que ce lien semble être faible.
The Austro-Prussian War: Austria's War with Prussia and Italy in 1866 . By Geoffrey Wawro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1966. Pp. 313. $59.95. ISBN 0-521-56059-4.
This expanded and reworked Yale dissertation ventures into a topic done spellbindingly two decades ago by one of the grand masters of German military affairs, Gordon Craig, whose Battle of Koeniggraetz (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1964), was published in a series commissioned by Hanson W. Baldwin. NewYork Times military affairs editor. Wawro does not approach the literary brilliance of Craig, but his work goes beyond it in several important respects. First, although Craig dealt with a good deal of the preliminary background and also the aftermath, his book focused squarely on the major battle which decided the war, whereas the book at hand deals with the entire war, which included several other battles, notably Langensalza, between Prussia and the Hanoverians in north-central Germany and Custoza between Austria and Italy in northern Italy. Secondly, whereas Craig knew the German sources as well as anyone, Wawro here uses not only German, but Austrian, French, British, and Italian ones. Of the last two, the former are important for the diplomatic background, the latter for the southern campaign area as well as for the problematic PrussianItalian relations. Thirdly,Wawro has dug deeper than Craig into primary source archives. Especially for the central emphasis of the book, the Austrians and Italians, he has mined the archives in Vienna, Rome, Naples, Milan, and Venice. For example, he uses a number of war diaries which officers from captain to field marshal kept and later deposited in military archives. Interestingly, both authors use Hans Delbriick andTheodor Fontane. Delbriick wrote half a dozen essays on the war and after his death in 1929 two of his colleagues published a fifth volume of his classic Art of War in the Framework of Political History which dealt substantially with 1866, partly on the basis of Delbriick's Berlin University lecture notes. Fontane covered the war as a newspaper correspondent and published more than a thousand pages from his eyewitness experiences, Der deutsche Krieg von 1866, 2 vols, (Berlin, 1871-72).