Civic Life of Cities Lab

CLC Cross-City Comparative Research Published in Nature Cities, October 29, 2024

Organizational practices, such as interacting with and advocating for constituents or engaging in event hosting and collaboration, are critical to integration—creating connections across lines of difference. However, these practices are unevenly distributed across neighborhoods and shaped by neighborhood characteristics. Here, connecting organizational and neighborhood-level data, this study explores how neighborhood affluence (income) and heterogeneity (migrant population share) affect the integrative practices among civil society organizations. Using unique survey data from five global cities, we analyze the organizational practices of 863 civil society organizations in 536 neighborhoods. We find that social integration practices—connecting people to each other—are more prevalent in poorer neighborhoods. Conversely, systemic integration practices—connecting people and organizations to other organizations in the ecosystem—are more common in heterogeneous neighborhoods, especially when they are affluent. These findings shed light on the role of organizations in promoting social cohesion and economic development as well as disparities in integrative practices among neighborhoods.

 

Read the paper in Nature Cities: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-024-00154-1
Read the Research Briefing: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-024-00164-z
Read the article written by Floris Vermeulen: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-024-00155-0

Learn more

CLC Vienna Team publishes articles about the societal and democratic role of nonprofits in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, August 2024

“Talking the Talk, or Walking the Walk? How Managerial Practices Relate to Nonprofit Organizations’ Role as Schools of Democracy”: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08997640241278634

“Democracy and Management: Organizational Practices and Nonprofits’ Contributions to Society”: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08997640241267861

“Societal roles of Nonprofit Organizations: Parsonian Echoes and Luhmannian Reframing of the Organization–Society Interface”: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08997640241241321

CLC Researchers win awards from the American Sociological Association Community and Urban Sociology (CUSS) Section, July 1, 2024

Jean Yen-Chun Lin won the Robert E. Park Book Award for A Spark in the Smokestacks: Environmental Organizing in Beijing Middle-Class Communities, published in 2023 in Columbia University Press, while Christof Brandtner won the Jane Addams Article Award for “Green American City: Civic Capacity and the Distributed Adoption of Urban Innovations,” published in 2022 in the American Journal of Sociology.

Learn more

Pre-doctoral Research Fellow in Organizational Sociology and Social Innovation

Supervisors: Christof Brandtner (emlyon business school) and Woody Powell (Stanford University)

Timeline: Starting in summer or fall 2024.

Learn More

CLC researcher Christof Brandtner publishes the article “Can Cities Be the Source of Scalable Innovations?” in Stanford Social Innovation Review, March 2023.

In this SSIR article, Christof discusses how cities, as ecosystems of networked organizations, provide the necessary scale, reach, and resources to bridge the gap between small experiments and big problems.

Read More

CLC researcher Wenjuan Zheng’s new article “Converting Donation to Transaction: How Platform Capitalism Exploits Relational Labor in Non-profit Fundraising” published in Socio-Economic Review (SER), February 2023.

This SER article written by Wenjuan investigates the ramifications of the platform economy on the civic sector.

Read More

CLC researcher Christof Brandtner invited to talk at the seminar “Cities are Back in Town” hosted by Sciences Po in Paris, France, December 1, 2022

Christof is currently an assistant professor at Emlyon Business School in France. His upcoming talk is titled “The Civic Life of Cities: Professional Expertise and the Organizational Production of Urban Integration”. The talk will draw on the San Francisco data and CLC’s recent work on global comparisons of civil society organizations to examine the organizational production of urban integration. 

Learn More

From Smoke and Mirrors to Walking the Talk: Decoupling in the Contemporary World

Patricia Bromley and the CLC director Woody Powell’s article “From Smoke and Mirrors to Walking the Talk: Decoupling in the Contemporary World” chosen for the Decade Award, given to the most highly cited work published in the Academy of Management Annals in the last 10 years.