"Philanthropy and Hybrid Organisations: Capital, the Market and Solutions to Social Problems"

For the financial year ending 31st August 1960, the Wellcome Foundation Ltd, the British-based pharmaceutical multinational, reported global sales of £27,668,789 and consolidated net profit of £2,018,520. In his 1960 Annual Review, the Chairman of the Foundation, Sir Michael Perrin, quoted an article from The Times stating that the main purpose of new drugs, was to enable sick people to recover more quickly. Perrin went onto remark that while this might be the case, a view was held by governments and the public around the world, that the cost of achieving this was becoming “unjustifiable,” to both the state and patient. Fortunately, however, the Wellcome Foundation Ltd., had been protected from the worst of such criticism because, according to Perrin, of its attitude toward its business activities, and “the utilisation of its distributed profits by the Wellcome Trust.” In referencing the distribution of the Foundation’s profits by the Wellcome Trust, Perrin was drawing attention to the distinct organisational form of the Wellcome organisation, in which the entire share capital of the pharmaceutical MNC – the Wellcome Foundation Ltd. - was owned by the Wellcome Trust: a philanthropic enterprise, created in 1936, upon the death of the entrepreneur-founder of the Wellcome Foundation Ltd., Henry Wellcome. Building on Brooks and Buckley (2024), this paper examines the hybrid-nature of the Wellcome Foundation, and the combination of profit and non-profit practices within the same organisation (Battilana et al. 2017). By analysing the blurred boundaries between practices, our research assesses to what extent the Trust’s ownership of a pharmaceutical MNE provided effective solutions to social and health-related challenges and generated societal value. In so doing, we reflect on the relationship between philanthropy and capitalism, contributing greater historical understanding to debates about philanthrocapitalism (McGoey, 2015; Youde, 2016) and the nature of private actor’s social activities.