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.”

Why many approaches to building social capital probably won’t work

September 24, 2010 at 5:54 pm | Posted in childcare centers, new books, social capital, what to read | Leave a comment

A new paper by Mario L. Small in the Royal Society of the Arts journal makes the case that many of the suggestions put forth to build social capital have little hope of success.  The reason?  Today, most people are too busy to build social capital, even if they think doing so would be a good idea.  Figuring out how to build social capital requires seriously reconsidering how people actually create and sustain those social bonds that end up being useful, trustworthy, and productive.  Based on his research on the unanticipated roles childcare centers played in structuring the networks of mothers, he suggests that would-be social capitalists shift attention from the individual to the routine organization.  As Matthew Taylor puts it, the best way to build social capital may be “by accident.”  See also commentary in the Social Capital Blog.

A new frontier in the analysis of urban nightlife establishments

July 9, 2010 at 2:57 pm | Posted in amenities, cities, consumption, culture, geography, race, reading list, social capital, what to read | 1 Comment

In “The Nightly Round: Space, Social Capital, and Urban Black Nightlife,” sociologist Marcus Hunter uses participant observation and semistructured interviews to consider the ways in which nightlife is used to mitigate the effects of social and spatial isolation, complementing the accomplishment of the daily round. Through an analysis of the nightly round—a process encompassing the social interactions, behaviors, and actions involved in going to, being in, and leaving the club—Hunter demonstrates that understanding the ways in which urban blacks use space in the nightclub to mediate racial segregation, sexual segregation, and limited social capital expands our current understanding of the spatial mobility of urban blacks as well as the important role of extra-neighborhood spaces in such processes. Further, the article highlights the ways that urban blacks use space in the nightclub to leverage socioeconomic opportunities and enhance social networks. While Hunter found that black heterosexual and lesbian and gay patrons used space in similar ways, black lesbians and gays were more likely to use the club as a space to develop ties of social support. The article can be found in the June 2010 issue of City and Community (volume 9, number 2).

New article highlights the power of ethnic entrepreneurship

March 10, 2010 at 11:30 pm | Posted in immigrants, neighborhoods, reading list, social capital, what to read | Leave a comment

In the new article, “Noneconomic Effects of Ethnic Entrepreneurship: A Focused Look at the Chinese and Korean Enclave Economies in Los Angeles,” Min Zhou and Myungduk Cho aim to develop a conceptual framework from a community perspective to examine the noneconomic effects of ethnic entrepreneurship. They pay close attention to the linkage between entrepreneurship and community building using ethnographic data from comparative case studies of the Chinese and Korean enclave economies in Los Angeles. They argue that it is the social embeddedness of entrepreneurship, rather than individual entrepreneurs per se, that creates a unique social environment conducive to upward social mobility. This study suggests that ethnic entrepreneurship plays a pivotal role in immigrant adaptation beyond observable economic gains. The analysis contributes to the literature on ethnic entrepreneurship by shifting the focal point from ultimate mobility outcomes—earnings or employment opportunities—to intermediate social processes—community building through the consolidation of ethnic social structures, the creation of ethnic social spaces, the return of the co-ethnic middle class, and social capital formation. In this respect, the enclave economy concept is superior for investigating specific social contexts and processes of group-level social mobility.

The piece appears in Thunderbird International Business Review, Vol. 52, No. 2, March/April 2010

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.

New book by Sandra Smith

September 24, 2008 at 8:16 pm | Posted in job centers, job search, new books, social capital, what to read | Leave a comment

In Lone Pursuit:Distrust and Defensive Individualism among the Black Poor, based on interviews with jobs seekers and job holders and on observations in a state job center, Smith examines the use of personal and institutional social capital among the black urban poor. From the publisher: Myriad theories have been put forward to explain the persistent joblessness among the black poor. In Lone Pursuit, Smith cuts through this thicket of competing explanations to examine the actual process through which the black poor search for jobs. Based on in-depth interviews with 105 low-income and low-skilled African American men and women, Smith reveals that pervasive distrust between black poor jobseekers and their labor market intermediaries makes the activation of personal and institutional forms of social capital for job-finding unlikely.

Nicole Marwell’s new book is out

December 15, 2007 at 6:00 am | Posted in neighborhoods, new books, social capital, social organization, what to read | Leave a comment

Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City (University of Chicago Press). The poor neighborhoods of today’s American cities are home to tens of thousands of nonprofit community-based organizations, which work diligently on tight budgets to provide assistance to some of our most vulnerable citizens. Scholars and policymakers have touted the role of CBOs in fostering neighborhood networks of trust and collective action, building “social capital” to combat school drop-out, crime, and other negative dynamics often found in poor places. This book draws on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in eight CBOs in Brooklyn to open up a wider lens on the organizational life of poor neighborhoods, showing how CBOs are embedded in complex and contentious systems of economic and political action, the outcomes of which determine the limits of CBOs’ ability to bring opportunity to the poor residents of
their neighborhoods.

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