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.”
July 9, 2009 at 10:26 am | Posted in immigrants, non-profits, organizational density, political organizations, social movements, what to read | Leave a comment
Sarah Reckhow’s “The Distinct Patterns of Organized and Elected Representation of Racial and Ethnic Groups,” published in Urban Affairs, uses data from Melissa DATA and newspaper accounts. She finds that, for Latinos and Asian-Americans, the group’s proportion in the population increases the number of political advocay organizations; for African-Americans, however, the pattern does not hold. From the abstract: Studies of minority political incorporation have demonstrated that advocacy organizations are critical for advancing minority electoral success and policy change. Drawing on an original data set of 30 midsized U.S. cities, the author evaluates the extent of organized representation of racial and ethnic groups and the effect of organized representation on elected representation. Latinos and Asian-Americans both have greater numbers of local advocacy organizations as the groups’ proportion of the population increases. Yet many cities with sizable African-American populations have a lower density of advocacy organizations than cities with fewer African-Americans. A smaller field of organizations increases elected representation for African-Americans but not for Latinos.
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