The global sum of financial resources devoted to the charitable activities of organizations together with personal donations by individuals exceeded USD 313 billion in 2023, which puts charity on a par with such financially intensive drivers of the global economy as personalized medicine or the electric vehicle market. The scale of this socio-economic phenomenon calls for a comprehensive scientific account, especially because there has been so little previous research on the activities of charitable organizations. The great financial and economic importance of charity as a feature of social relations is justification enough for systematically analyzing the various impacts of charitable activities and developing a rational basis for managing charitable organizations. The purpose of this study is to synthesize theoretical approaches to defining the dominant factors in the management of charitable organizations and to identify the most acute theoretical and methodological problems that may affect their development. The study’s empirical evidence was derived from a sociological survey, proceeded mainly along inductive lines, and then employed Euler diagrams to arrive at the authors’ systematization of categories associated with the concept of charity. The management principles specific to the special class of structures exemplified by charitable organizations were synthesized. A methodology was developed to classify them in such a way that charitable organizations can be distinguished from the wider group of non-profit organizations while also taking into account the charitable activities of commercial firms. Studies of charity in the twenty-first century have been so highly specialized that the scientific landscape has become fragmented and lacks a comprehensive theoretical basis for this dynamically evolving set of practices. This study has turned up new data, which may be applied not only to individual organizations, but also to the development of state regulation in the charity sector.
Alekseev et al. (Wed,) studied this question.