Kieran Healy

Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs.

Last Best Gifts (University of Chicago Press, 2006) is a study of the social organization of exchange in human blood and organs. More than any other altruistic gesture, blood and organ donation exemplifies the true spirit of self-sacrifice. Donors literally give of themselves for no reward so that the life of an individual—often anonymous—may be spared. But as the demand for blood and organs has grown, the value of a system that depends solely on gifts has been called into question, and the possibility has surfaced that donors might be supplemented or replaced by paid suppliers.

Last Best Gifts offers a fresh perspective on this ethical dilemma by examining the social organization of blood and organ donation in Europe and the United States. Gifts of blood and organs are not given everywhere in the same way or to the same extent. These contrasts that allow us to examine the pivotal role that institutions play in fashioning the contexts for donations. Procurement organizations, I argue, sustain altruism by providing opportunities to give and by producing public accounts of what giving means. In the end, successful systems rest on the fairness of the exchange, rather than the purity of a donor’s altruism or the size of a financial incentive.

 

Last Best Gifts won the Outstanding Book Award for 2007 from the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA), was a finalist for the 2006 C. Wright Mills Award, and received an Honorable Mention in the 2008 Zelizer Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association's Section on Economic Sociology.

You can learn more at the book’s website.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

• Kieran Healy. 2008. Lo Scambio di Doni, in L'Altro in Me: Dono del Sangue fra Culture, Pratiche e Identità, edited by Annamaria Fantauzzi. Milano: AVIS Nazionale, 36–42.
• Kieran Healy. 2008. Sociology. In Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit and Thomas Pogge (eds), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Second Edition), 90–122. Blackwell, New York.
• Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy. 2007. Moral Views of Market Society. Annual Review of Sociology 33:285–311. (PDF.)
• Kieran Healy. 2006. Do Presumed Consent Laws Raise Organ Procurement Rates? DePaul Law Review, 55:1017–1043. (PDF).
• Kieran Healy. 2004. Altruism as an organizational problem: The case of organ procurement. American Sociological Review, 69:387–404. (PDF)
• Kieran Healy. 2004. Sacred markets and secular ritual in the organ transplant industry. In Frank Dobbin, editor, The Sociology of the Economy, pages 336–359. Russell Sage Foundation, New York.
• Kieran Healy. 2002. Digital technology and cultural goods. Journal of Political Philosophy, 10(4):478–500. (PDF).
• Kieran Healy. 2002. What’s new for Culture in the New Economy? Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, 32:86–103. (PDF).
• Bruce Western and Kieran Healy. 2001. Wage growth and labor decline in the industrialized democracies, 1965–1993. In Nancy Bermeo, editor, Unemployment in the New Europe, pages 121–144. Cambridge University Press, New York.
• Kieran Healy. 2000. Embedded altruism: Blood collection regimes and the European Union’s donor population. American Journal of Sociology, 105:1633–57. (PDF).
• Kieran Healy. 1999. The emergence of HIV in the U.S. blood supply: organizations, obligations and the management of uncertainty. Theory and Society, 28:529–558. (PDF).
• Bruce Western and Kieran Healy. 1999. Explaining the OECD wage slowdown: Recession or labor decline? European Sociological Review, 15:233–249. (PDF).
• Kieran Healy. 1998. Conceptualising constraint: Mouzelis, Archer and the concept of social structure. Sociology, 32:509–522. (PDF).
• Kieran Healy. 1998. The New Institutionalism and Irish social policy. In Sean Healy and Brigid Reynolds, editors, Social Policy in Ireland: Principles, Practice and Problems, pages 59–83. Oak Tree Press, Dublin.