This has been a sociology of the act of charity, the institution of charity and the notion of charity. Sociology and social theory, after much anthropology devoted to the gift and the informal helping that exists between people, have largely left charity alone, instead considering it a field for social policy or public administration studies to cover, despite the work of charities and the people who work for them being central figures in providing expert social commentary and contributing to sociological studies concerned with inequality, disadvantage and injustice. In this Conclusion I want to summarise what we have learned through this examination of how charity works, about what it means for charity and what it means for people.

The first thing to note is that the idea that charity, gift-giving and kindness are imbued with a certain symbolic goodness that improves the actor's image is not a new observation. Mauss’ work on the power of the gift, Shapely’s, Ostrander's and other historical demonstrations of the use of charity for social status, and many examinations of the ways in which businesses use CSR to alleviate some reputational damage, demonstrate that researchers and charity professionals have been thinking about these issues for a long time. Possible cynicism around the veracity of the motivation for charitable deeds is almost instrumental to the doing of charity. From white students taking a gap year before university in former colonial states so they can pose for photos with people of colour and demonstrate their enthusiasm for ‘otherness’ (Snee, 2014; Kallman, 2020), demonstrating their goodwill in Indonesian orphanages that exist principally as places for ‘voluntourism’, and not places to alleviate suffering (Flaherty, 2016: 47), to parents who purchase orphanages in Botswana so that their children have places to spend their summers volunteering in order to bulk up their applications to Harvard (yes, really; see Bruni, 2016), because suffering is bad and alleviating suffering is good, such actions can be manipulated and taken advantage of.