The mesofoundations of integration in modern cities

My second line of research asks: when and how do organizations contribute to the production of meaning, community, and integration? Sociologists have shown that the presence of organizations causally affects such outcomes as connectedness, social capital, crime, entrepreneurship, and crisis resilience. But extant studies leave unclear the processes – both internal (among members) and external (in their environments) through which organizations produce personal, social, and systemic integration. I identify these processes through my work with the Civic Life of Cities Lab, where we have collected data on over 600 nonprofits across six global cities. As part of this broader study, I led the collection of over 50 in-depth interviews with the leaders of Bay Area nonprofits.

On the production of meaning, I am spearheading a project on how organizational leaders strive to foster meaningful work environments for their staff. Drawing on in-depth longitudinal interviews that we conducted with 43 organizational leaders (before, during, and after the pandemic), we reveal the surprising fragility and fundamental relationality of meaningful work. This paper has received an R&R at Administrative Science Quarterly.

On the production of integration, I am co-leading a series of papers that examine how organizational structures and practices shape the production of two types of integration: social integration, creating social ties among constituents, and systemic integration, connecting constituents to institutional resources. In our first paper, we argue that organizations’ pursuit of social and systemic integration is linked to whether they prioritize suite-level (professional) expertise or street-level (experiential) expertise among their staff and volunteers. In a second, forthcoming paper, we examine what allows some organizations to pursue both forms of integration simultaneously.

Finally, on the production of community, I have studied how community can be maintained in the face of change. In an paper published in Qualitative Sociology, I use the case of how “Christian Fellowship” navigated the coronavirus pandemic to advance theorizing on how frames shape communal participation. I argue that reframing is triggered by temporal disconnect between past frames and present circumstances, present circumstances and imagined futures, or all three. My findings offer insights on how organizations striving to rebuild community post-pandemic might renew prior frames and fashion new ones.