Foundations are one of the oldest organizational forms globally; their number and resources, as well as their socio-political and economic importance, have steadily continued to grow. Yet, foundations’ attributes, activities, and actual achievements remain underexplored and poorly understood. This is particularly noticeable in the context of global policy and transnational administration, an area where foundations tend to be subliminal players, acting as a widely unrecognized socio-political undercurrent. Addressing the resulting need for better and alternative conceptualizations of foundations, our paper uses French pragmatic sociology of critique (FPSC), a non-structuralist, post-Bourdesian, approach to sociology, to theorize philanthropic foundations within the policy agora. Through FPSC, we present foundations as a composite setup of activity, where critically reflexive actors bring normative ideologies and knowledge to policy, providing a new avenue for how scholarship can interpret and critique foundations and their influence.

中文翻译：

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实用主义、伙伴关系和说服：全球政策论坛中慈善基金会的理论化

基金会是全球最古老的组织形式之一；它们的数量和资源以及其社会政治和经济重要性持续稳步增长。然而，基金会的属性、活动和实际成就仍未得到充分探索和了解。这在全球政策和跨国管理的背景下尤其引人注目，在这个领域，基金会往往是潜意识的参与者，充当着广泛未被认识的社会政治暗流。为了解决由此产生的对更好和替代的基金会概念化的需求，我们的论文使用了法国实用主义批判社会学（FPSC），一种非结构主义、后布尔代主义的社会学方法，在政策集市中对慈善基金会进行理论化。通过 FPSC，我们将基础呈现为活动的复合设置，