Street Smarts and Org Charts: Professional Expertise and the Pursuit of Urban Integration

Abstract

The presence of organizations has been shown to causally affects a community’s connectedness, crime, entrepreneurship, and crisis resilience. But extant studies of communities conceal how organizations pursue the production of two types of urban integration. Organizations may produce social integration, creating social ties among constituents, as well as systemic integration, connecting constituents to institutional resources. We argue that organizations’ ability to produce social and systemic integration is principally due to the degrees to which organizational members draw on suite-level expertise (“I know the system”) and street-level expertise (“I know the people”) when they make decisions. Representative survey data of nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area collected over 15 years shows that nonprofits’ pursuit of urban integration depends on these forms of expertise. Comparative interviews explain why professional staff and managers boost systemic integration, whereas volunteer staff and members foster social integration. The paper contributes to scholarship in organizational and urban sociology by examining how organization-level features influence the pursuit of urban integration and by shedding light on unintended consequences of professionalism. Our results challenge the stylized fact that nonprofits necessarily create community and suggest alternative ways to understand and operationalize how organizations are embedded in their urban environment.