Children helping children? : Values and concerns in corporate charity

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to explore corporate children's charity in practice. This is achieved by examining empirically a campaign organized by the company IKEA in collaboration with the non-profit organization Save the Children. In this campaign, organized in Sweden in 2017, the total revenue from the sales of IKEA's soft toy collection based on children's drawings were donated to Save the Children's safe sports project. Online ethnographic methods were used to collect the empirical materials: the online and in-store promotion of the campaign and the soft toys. In additions, qualitative interviews with professionals at the IKEA Foundation, IKEA and Save the Children were conducted. These materials were analyzed using the theoretical concepts of "values" and "concerns". The argument in the thesis is that coordinating what is worthy, important, and desirable (values) with matters of worry (concerns) allows the two partners to present their collaboration as a shared charity campaign for a children's rights cause. It is argued that the work of coordinating values and concerns can be achieved in different ways, which are described in the empirical chapters. For example, by discursively separating the potentially conflicting values or pairing concerns with the values they threaten. However, as a result, some values of children and of charity are amplified, while others are taken for granted.The study combines two interdisciplinary fields, Child Studies and Valuation Studies. The contribution to Child Studies is a practice-based approach to studying values in children’s charity and, in particular, the values and ideals of children. The thesis contributes to Valuation Studies by developing tools for analyzing more elusive values and informal valuation practices.