Street smarts and org charts: Professional expertise and the organizational production of urban integration

Abstract

Sociologists have shown causal effects of the community presence of organizations on connectedness, crime, entrepreneurship, and crisis resilience. But city- and community-level studies conceal how organizational features shape the production of urban integration. We contend that organizations may produce social integration, creating social ties among constituents, as well as systemic integration, connecting constituents to institutional resources. We argue that organizations’ ability to produce social and systemic integration is principally due to whether organizational members draw on suite-level expertise (“I know the system”) or street-level expertise (“I know the people”) when they relate to their constituents. Representative survey data of nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area collected over 15 years shows that nonprofits’ production of urban integration depends on these forms of expertise. Comparative interviews explain why professional staff and managers boost systemic integration, whereas volunteer staff and members foster social integration. The paper contributes to scholarship in organizational and urban sociology by examining the organizational production of social and systemic integration and by shedding light on unintended consequences of professionalization. Our results challenge the stylized fact that nonprofits necessarily create community and suggest alternative ways to understand and operationalize how organizations are embedded in their urban environment.

San Francisco Bay Area: A Left Coast Metropolis Grapples with Technocracy and Inequality

“…With respect to the closeness of interactions with their beneficiaries, the more nonprofits are reliant on external funding sources, the less their staff members or volunteers know their beneficiaries. Hence the idea of embeddedness-often debated in scholarly circles-is multidimensional (Granovetter 1985;Brandtner and Laryea 2022). Organizational goals of trust-building and interactions with beneficiaries represent two central but different aspects of nonprofits' ties to their local community.…”