The Gift Relationship: Cultural Variation in Blood Donor Discourse

In recent years the rhetoric of the market has encroached by a process of interdiscursivity (Bhatia 2005) into areas of professional discourse that were once immune to the characterization of social interaction primarily in terms of the sale of goods and services. Whereas members of the public travelling by plane or train were once referred to as ‘passengers’, today they are increasingly ‘customers’; whereas hospitals once focused exclusively on ‘patient care’, they now have to rate the quality of ‘customer services’; whereas undergraduates were once ‘members of a college’, with the commodification of higher education they increasingly see themselves as consumers who are required to tick boxes to indicate the level of satisfaction with the services provided. Against the backdrop of this shift in public and institutional discourse, this chapter examines the discourse of blood donation, an institutional practice that would appear to be an emblematic form of altruism (Piliavin/Callero 1991) rather than being subject to market forces, as argued in the seminal study by Richard Titmuss, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (1970).