Rethinking urban poverty from institutional and organizational perspectives

January 19, 2011 at 2:23 pm | Posted in barbershops, conference, economic development, grocery stores, health, housing, immigrants, neighborhoods, non-profits, organizational density, organizational networks, political organizations, poverty, social capital, social service agencies | Leave a comment

Urban organizations conference in Chicago! “The University of Chicago is hosting a conference entitled “Rethinking Urban Poverty for the 21st Century: Institutional and Organizational Perspectives” on March 10-11, 2011.  As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, the prospects for U.S. cities remain uncertain. The promised reinvention of many former manufacturing centers has been halted in its tracks, as record budget deficits, limited growth prospects, and stubbornly high unemployment rates undermine urban recovery. The urban poor continue to bear most heavily the burden of a continuing housing crisis, chronically underperforming schools at a time of increasing returns to education, persistently high births to unmarried mothers, unprecedented rates of obesity and other health problems, and an expansion of the criminal justice system that insists on breaking imprisonment records.   Understanding these conditions calls for scholarly perspectives the focus not only on individuals or neighborhoods but also on the institutions and organizations that structure their daily lives, mediate their relation to the state, and facilitate or constrain their ability to acquire resources. The papers either adopt or examine the role of institutional and organizational perspectives to the study of housing, health, criminal justice, education, and immigration in urban contexts. For more, and to register, see http://urbanforums.uchicago.edu.”

Impressive service provides rich data on nearly every business in U.S., other countries

August 28, 2009 at 6:38 pm | Posted in amenities, barbershops, beauty salons, childcare centers, data | 1 Comment

Want to find out how many large supermarkets are located within 5 miles of a given address?  Or how much each of the barbershops in Harlem did in sales last year?  Or how many employees each of the banks in Chicago’s South Side has?  Or how about the credit rating of all small retail shops in South Central Los Angeles?   Or the number of Lutheran churches in Minneapolis with more than two personal computers?  Check out ReferenceUSA, which provides what they claim is the world’s most comprehensive data on U.S. businesses and organizations (around 14 million).  Designed for commercial purposes, there are limitless possibilities for scholars interested in neighborhood conditions, spatial analysis, labor issues, and urban conditions more generally.  Their data are assembled from phone directories, county courthouses, public record notices, and others.  A team of 600 researchers works full time on maintaining and updating the database.  Check out their promotional video on data quality.  (The service also has personal residential data on 100 million U.S. households, the type of data used by telemarketers.   You can send them an email to remove your name.)  Urbanorgs researchers will want to know that the business data are very easy to download (in Excel, tab delmited, and other formats) and remarkably rich.  From their website: “The lists include business name and phone number, complete address, key executive name, SIC code, employee size, sales volume, business expenditures and much more.  In addition… geo-codes for mapping, fax and toll-free numbers, website address, franchise and brand information, headline news, liens, judgements and bankruptcies, email addresses, number of computers, work-at-home businesses, and business credit rating scores.”  Many libraries subscribe to the service. The more obscure data are not available for every organization, but what is available is impressive.  (Updated)

Mario Small publishes book on networks of mothers in urban childcare centers

June 5, 2009 at 12:26 am | Posted in barbershops, beauty salons, childcare centers, churches, grocery stores, neighborhoods, new books, organizational networks, poverty, social capital, what to read | Leave a comment

Mario Small has published a new book, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everday Life.  From the book description: Social capital theorists have shown that some people do better than others in part because they enjoy larger, more supportive, or otherwise more useful networks. But why do some people have better networks than others? Unanticipated Gains argues that the answer lies less in people’s deliberate “networking” than in the institutional conditions of the churches, colleges, firms, gyms, childcare centers, schools, and other organizations in which they happen to participate routinely. The book illustrates and develops this argument by exploring the experiences of New York City mothers whose children were enrolled in childcare centers.  Relying on scores of in-depth interviews with mothers, quantitative data on both mothers and centers, and detailed case studies of other routine organizations (from beauty salons and bath houses to colleges and churches), Unanticiapted Gains shows that how much people gain from their connections depends substantially on institutional conditions they often do not control, and through everyday process they may not even be aware of.  Click here for more information and an excerpt.

Joe Galaskiewicz receives NSF funding to study Phoenix organizations and their impact on the urban community

May 21, 2009 at 7:34 pm | Posted in amenities, barbershops, beauty salons, churches, grocery stores, neighborhoods, news, non-profits, organizational density, organizational networks, social service agencies, supermarkets | Leave a comment

phoenix-downtown

Joe Galaskiewicz at the University of Arizona recently received $162,274 from
the National Science Foundation to fund his project, “Organizations and their
Impact on the Urban Community.” This funding helps Joe continue his research on
the distribution of organizational resources across the Phoenix metropolitan
area, their effect on what children do in the free time on the weekends, and
how organizations migrate across the metropolitan community in response to
demographic shifts, changes in zoning laws, and competition among
organizational providers. The research looks at a broad range of
establishments that serve community residents including parks, recreation
centers, churches, retail outlets, restaurants, bowling and fitness centers,
barber shops, department stores, malls, theatres, and many, many more local
establishments. For some of Joe’s preliminary results, go to:

http://www.childresearch.net/RESOURCE/RESEARCH/2007/GALASKIEWICZ.HTM

New book by Martin Sanzchez-Jankowski

August 9, 2008 at 2:47 am | Posted in barbershops, beauty salons, gangs, grocery stores, neighborhoods, new books, what to read | Leave a comment

Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods (University of California Press), based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in New York and Los Angeles, examines how several types of local organizations—the grocery store, the barbershop and beauty salon, the local high school, the gang, and the housing project—structure order and stability in urban neighborhoods.

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