People, Place, and System: Organizations and the Renewal of Urban Social Theory

This article offers a theoretical framework for thinking about how organizations matter for the production, reproduction, and amelioration of urban poverty. We draw on the classical concept of integration, in both its social and systemic versions, as an important tool for advancing urban social theory. A key challenge for urban organizational analysts is to keep within view the processes of both social and systemic integration, while empirically investigating how they are connected (or not). Too many urban researchers focus on one or the other, with little conceptualization of the importance of linking the two. We argue that urban organizations of all kinds provide a strategic site for observing processes of both social and systemic integration, and that urban organizational research should examine many of them to better understand the multiple urban transformations currently in process.