Michael McQuarrie and Nicole Marwell publish new paper on “The Missing Organizational Dimension in Urban Sociology”

UrbanOrgs members Michael McQuarrie and Nicole Marwell have a new paper coming out in the September issue of the journal City and Community. The paper, “The Missing Organizational Dimension in Urban Sociology,” takes issue with the treatment of organizations in much urban sociology. The authors argue that both Marxian political economists and Chicagoan ethnographers and quantitative analysts treat organizations as derivative rather than productive of urban social relations. McQuarrie and Marwell do not see this problem as epistemological or methodological. Instead, they argue that it is rooted in the objects of analysis that urban sociologists choose. Drawing on key elements of structuration theory, these scholars attempt to lay the groundwork for improving the treatment of organizations in urban sociology by flagging some of the key insights in the sociology of organizations. They do not view this intellectual borrowing as a one-way street and emphasize that urbanists have a contribution to make to sociological thinking about organizations. Correcting these problems, the authors point out, is essential if we are to understand the link between contemporary institutional transformations and urban neighborhoods. The article appears in the September 2009 issue of City and Community (Volume 8, Issue 3).