The 2009 ASA conference in San Francisco, CA will hold a session on “Formal Organizations and Urban Transformations,” organized by UrbanOrgs.org network members Nicole Marwell and Michael McQuarrie. Session description:

In recent years, there has been a resurgence in urban sociologists’ interest in the role of formal organizations in cities.In contrast to William Julius Wilson’s much-cited thesis that cities, especially their poor neighborhoods, have become characterized by a vast lack of formal organizational resources, in the last ten years a growing number of urban sociologists has produced empirical work that takes formal organizations as their central object of inquiry.This work has included ethnographic studies of organizations in urban environments (e.g., McRoberts 2004, Marwell 2007), quantitative analyses of the variations in organizational density across neighborhoods (e.g., Rankin & Quane 2000, Small 2006), and historical discussions of urban organizational environments (e.g., McQuarrie 2007). Organizations are key holders and distributors of resources to individuals, families, and communities. Organizations also participate in the structuring of opportunity at the meso and macro levels, through their interactions with other organizations in neighborhoods, cities, and beyond. For both these reasons, urban scholars are increasingly documenting the role that organizations play in urban economic, political, and social realms. This session aims at bringing together a set of papers by scholars doing cutting-edge research on the intersection of organizations and various urban issues and transformations.