Christopher Weare Paul Lichterman Nina Eliasoph Nicole Esparza University of Southern California
This project integrates ethnographic research with social network analysis to investigate how a large field of organizations define and pursue housing issues in Los Angeles. It asks: How do different organizations decide an issue is a "housing" issue or related to one? Housing issues may are broadly defined as those locale that lack resources, political power, cultural recognition or a combination of all three. At issue is how collective, problem-solving activity (civic engagement) across institutional sectors and actors respond to a public problem. Since the public problem is housing, the concerns is how voluntary, governmental or commercial organizations, coalitions, and alliances respond to this problem, even when it is not their primary focus.
The researchers will investigate organizational styles that make the housing problem an agenda item in some organizations and not others. A combination of ethnographic work and network analyses are carried out over a range of organizations to track which organizations are central or peripheral in the housing field. In this way it will discover which organizational styles and ways of defining housing issues are most widely accepted. The quantitative, network data helps to orient the researchers as to which case studies to examine, ethnographically. And, ethnographic, qualitative work helps to reveal unforeseen network data.
Broader Impacts: The project clarifies for policy-makers and citizens the diverse styles of public involvement. It shows the organizational styles' practical consequences for policy, coalition-building, and inclusion of low-income and historically disenfranchised groups.
PI: Christopher Weare, University of Southern California Co-PIs: Paul Lichterman, University of Southern California Nina Eliasoph, University of Southern California Nicole Esparza, University of Southern California Section 1: findings This project combined close-up, observational (ethnographic) research with social network analysis to investigate how a large field of organizations prioritize and pursue housing issues in Los Angeles, a city with a critical shortage of affordable housing, severe environmental degradation, and many neighborhoods that claim distinctive ethnic or aesthetic qualities. Begun on an earlier grant in 2007, the project completed its final phase at the end of 2011. The project asked four main questions: Which ways of describing housing problems and solutions circulate widely? How if at all do these combine with claims about other social issues such as environmental harm? How do different organizations decide an issue is a "housing" issue or related to one? How do some organizations become more central to the field of housing advocacy in Los Angeles than others? The project hypothesized that an organization’s "style" would strongly influence the way an organization frames "housing" issues and how it collaborates with or avoids other organizations. Organizational style is made up of members’ enduring, informal understandings about the organization’s collective identity, its place in the public world, and its members’ strength of commitment to each other. The project used ethnographic research to investigate a relatively small number of organizational styles, and ways of defining housing issue agendas, in 24 affordable housing, housing rights and environmental/transportation organizations, while it used network analysis of 150 organizations to track which organizations are central or peripheral in the housing field. The project also coded the internet websites of the 24 organizations, a first step toward a method for determining organizational style without time-consuming observational study. Findings from the network analysis show that Los Angeles has a very fragmented field of housing organizations, divided into clusters that have limited contacts with each other. Organizations collaborate much more broadly in sharing information than they do in sharing other resources. Findings from the ethnographic research show that organizational style differences can create conflicts even between organizations that have the same interests in housing policy, while style similarities can facilitate work between organizations with different ethnic/racial memberships that pursue somewhat different agendas. Some housing advocates failed to recognize that some environmental organizations were working with them on housing issues—and neglected to name such groups as collaborators on a network survey—because those groups had different styles. The synthesis of network and ethnographic research revealed that similarities in organizational style can overcome some of the impediments of fragmented, clustered network ties in the LA housing field, while differences in style can contribute to the fragmentation and clustering, as seen in the break-up of an influential housing coalition and formation of a new coalition. In all, we produced a new conceptual framework for understanding how public problems get defined, how those definitions circulate among advocacy organizations, and what makes coalitions of advocacy organizations endure or break apart. In terms of broader impacts, the project clarifies for policy-makers and citizens that advocacy organizations have very diverse styles of public involvement, apart from different ways of framing housing problems. For instance, some organizations have an instrumental style that assumes public involvement is about courting short-term allies and bargaining with and pressuring governmental officials. Others have a community-based style that defines "community" in terms of an ethnic "people" or a low-income constituency, avoids deal-making in favor of high boundaries and shared ideological principles, and remains wary of governmental officials. Different organizational styles attract different kinds of members and allies. Different styles also affect organizations’ ability to pursue different kinds of housing issues—affordability, tenant’s rights, or environment-friendly developments. There is no single, "rational" or "effective" style of pursuing housing issues. Differences in style inhibit coalitions across housing, environmental and transit issues that should be related. These produce practical consequences for policy-making, and inclusion of low-income and historically disenfranchised groups in housing advocacy and policy. Partly because of enduring organizational styles and network allegiances, even the foreclosure crisis of 2008 did not deeply affect how housing organizations have pursued their aims since that time. Section 2: publications and products We developed •a social network dataset of the housing Los Angeles housing field, based on organizational affiliations; •a social network dataset of the Los Angeles housing field, based on an original sociometric survey; •and draft of a detailed coding guide that researchers can use to analyze an organization’s internet website and infer the organizational style of that organization in the absence of ethnographic data. Section 3: other information We developed an undergraduate course in which students conduct first-hand ethnographic research in civic associations.
