How do human service organizations impact urban inequality? This is the central question I take up in my research. I focus largely on how ideas, values, and norms at nonprofit organizations guide their efforts to manage homelessness and housing insecurity in America.

In my current project, I examine organizational discourse on homelessness in the United States. Relying on over 150 interviews with leaders from nonprofit organizations in dozens of American cities and an original corpus of archival materials from the websites, social media accounts, and listservs of more than 500 nonprofits, I describe under-recognized discursive frames organizations use to publicly convey three kinds of ideas: ideas about the roots of homelessness, the inevitability (or solvability) of homelessness, and local attitudes toward homelessness. I show how the discursive frames legitimize particular modes of responding to homelessness, ultimately arguing that organizational discourse is both an under-appreciated social determinant of how marginalized urban groups fare and a means by which long-disputed social problems take on a range of stable meanings.

Organizational Discourse and Homelessness

In earlier work, I ask how organizational processes shape the well-being of socially and economically disadvantaged people. One ethnographic project, conducted at a Boston-area social service nonprofit, yielded two sole-authored papers. One, titled “Does ‘Social Infrastructure’ Curb Drug Addiction? The Role of Local Institutional Norms,” is published in Theory and Society. It shows how intra- and inter-organizational norms can undermine the the healthful potential of shared settings, depending on how they structure interaction within those spaces. The second, titled “Risky Ties and Taxing Ties: The Multiple Dimensions of Negativity,” is published in Qualitative Sociology. It considers why organizationally mediated ‘negative’ ties may not be liabilities, and may in fact help individuals who are trying to work through difficult circumstances, like drug addiction and housing instability.

A separate project yielded a paper titled “‘We Can Help, but There’s a Catch’: Nonprofit Organizations and Access to Government-Funded Resources among the Poor,” published in the Journal of Organizational Ethnography. The paper, co-authored with Andreja Siliunas and Mario Luis Small, analyzes published case studies to document the constraints and intrusions to which low-income individual must commonly acquiesce if they wish to take advantage of nonprofits’ roles as brokers of vital resources.

Organizational Processes and Well-Being