About ReDigIm

Project overview

Across Europe, citizens are increasingly using digital tools such as crowdfunding websites, apps, payment technologies and social media to engage in practices of giving, sharing and donating.

These new redistributive practices point to novel modes of citizen participation, solidarity and care for others, but they are also potentially disruptive of established state-mandated forms of social provisioning, raising questions about the future of taxation systems in European welfare states.

ReDigIm examined citizens’ engagement with digital opportunities for donation and contribution. We investigated the collective, common-sense understandings of redistribution that inform and give meaning to these practices, which we describe as redistributive imaginaries.

By analysing five national contexts representing different welfare state models and philanthropic traditions – UK, Switzerland, Finland, Spain and Montenegro – the project explored the implications of emergent redistributive practices and imaginaries for the future of prosocial contribution in Europe.

Research approach

Located in cultural sociology, media and cultural studies, and social and cultural anthropology, the research team formulated a qualitative, mixed-methods research approach comprised of four work packages:

1. A discourse analysis of news media and policy texts identified the values attributed to the digital in public debate about redistribution.
2. An affordance analysis established the features, functions and interactive possibilities of digital platforms designed or used to practiceredistribution.
3. Interviews and participant observation with civil society groups explored how citizens engage with and make sense of digitally-mediated forms of redistribution.
4. Knowledge exchange workshops promoted stakeholder deliberation on the implications of the research findings for their sector/area of expertise develop evidence-based scenarios for the future of prosocial contribution.

We have published reports on each phase of the research which can be accessed via our publications page.

Research findings

REDIGIM generated significant findings at the national scale which we synthesized to produce European-level outcomes. We found that civil society is a critical locus of mean-making about redistribution, and redistributive imaginaries are shaped by digital ideologies,

affordances and material infrastructures. We identified seven dominant imaginaries, and found that solutionist and market-friendly conceptions of the digital are deeply embedded in these ways of thinking. Redistributive imaginaries tend to reinforce a narrative of welfare state decline, and to consolidate an emerging common sense about the role of private and civil sector actors in mixed economies of welfare. Fieldwork research also foregrounded frictions, discontents, and forms of resistance to the demands that follow from the digital shift in civil society.

REDIGIM has significantly advanced the study of redistributive imaginaries, demonstrating that it is vital to set aside long-established definitions of redistribution which focus solely on the welfare state, and that collective sense-making about resource-sharing takes place through a much wider range of practices, mechanisms, and institutions.

Explore our research findings via an interactive microsite, project report, and other outputs.