Between Institutional and Domestic Logics: Symbolic Capital in Community Development in a Disadvantaged Neighbourhood in Berlin,Germany

Abstract

Community development projects aim to activate residents of disadvantaged neighbourhoods through social capital, as does, for example, the Stadtteilmütter project in such a neighbourhood in Berlin, Germany. However, after decades of such initiatives, disadvantaged neighbourhoods still tend to be pockets of disadvantage. This article explores one possible reason for this community development failure: the focus on enhancing social capital does not include enough attention to symbolic resources. However, as we argue through the empirical lens of the experiences of workers in the Stadtteilmütter project, the symbolic capital of reputation and respect in the domestic logics in a disadvantaged neighbourhood can collide with institutional logics of ‘facts’ and professional distance. This collision creates ambivalence in trustworthiness, whereas trusting relations are a central feature of social capital.

Keywords

community development neighbourhood social capital symbolic capital

Introduction

Since the 1960s, community development projects aimed to increase support among residents as a strategy against neighbourhood disadvantage, aiming at ‘improving the conditions in which local resources operate’ (Matarrita-Cascante and Brennan, 2012: 297). In recent years, projects with similar aims appeared under new terms, such as community resilience and capacity building (Cavaye and Ross, 2019) or caring communities (Walther, 2022). When state agents initiate such activation, scholars discussed it as a neoliberal project of retreating welfare states (Elwood, 2002; Leslie and Hunt, 2013). When grass-roots initiatives bring residents together, academics perceive them more positively (Holston, 2019; Morrow and Parker, 2020). Such social capital interventions (Shiell et al., 2020) mostly share a belief in the strengthening of residents’ ties to enhance resource access by virtue of personal networks, or social capital (Portes, 1998), in the form of bridges (Gittell and Vidal, 1998; Putnam, 2000). Such social ties are then expected to lift people and the places where they live, a widely critiqued idea (DeFilippis, 2001; Kadushin, 2004).

Our article is born from a concern that after many years, such projects continue to be (re)invented, with limited success (Mathers et al., 2008; Newman and Ashton, 2004). Neighbourhoods where lower income groups have not been displaced continue to reproduce disadvantage (Sharkey, 2008). Decades of community development programmes based on social capital ideas have not changed their fate. One partial explanation of this ‘community development failure’ may come from more attention being paid to whether people have bridging social ties than to how they activate them (Blokland and Noordhoff, 2008; Curley, 2009). Our article argues that insufficient recognition of symbolic capital in the conception of community development programmes may partly explain why they do not deliver their promises.

We have two aims. First, we seek to bring symbolic capital back into the social capital debate. Second, we want to explore empirically through material collected with the Stadtteilmütter programme in Berlin, what a focus on symbolic capital can help us see in the operations of a community development project under regimes of continuous stigmatization and racialization of ‘immigrant’ neighbourhoods. Community development programmes grew, after all, in a context where ‘the perception of oppressed immigrant women in need of institutional support’ has remained ‘dominant and inﬂuential in policy-making’ (Inowlocki and Lutz, 2000: 307).

We find that the bridging work of Stadtteilmütter [mothers of the neighbourhood] enables them to acquire respect. Yet they inhabit ambivalent positions between state agents and the mothers who form their clientele. As workers, they are expected to act out a role ascribed through the project as mothers from the neighbourhood. But when they put as much heart in their work as the domestic logics in this neighbourhood require, a tension occurs with institutional logics, which expect them to detach. This tension is embedded in the broader historical context of racialized degradation of migrant women (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 1999: 14) and neighbourhood stigmatization.¹

Social Capital, Trust and Symbolic Capital

Researchers on neighbourhood outcomes in education (Alameda-Lawson and Lawson, 2019), unemployment (Nguyen et al., 2016), loneliness among the elderly (Simons et al., 2020), ethnic diversity (Laurence, 2017), migration (Ryan et al., 2008) and public health (Visser et al., 2021) have used the social capital concept. Scholarship has mostly focused on increasingly refined tools to measure social capital. This focus moved social capital away from important initial elements, such as that social capital is not something we ‘have’, but lies within relations, and that it draws on contextualized mechanisms of trust and reputation (Coleman, 1988: 97–98). In early work on political effectiveness in Italy, Putnam (1993) argued that citizens’ trust in state institutions differed regionally because of the historically patterned workings of social capital. Later, Putnam’s (2000) definition of social capital as participatory potential, civic orientation and trust popularized the concept. We learnt that, among other elements, trust mattered as a community feature. But that trust mattered did not clarify how.

Sampson et al. (1997) coined ‘collective efficacy’ for residents’ capacities to work together and also stressed the importance of trust. They inspired publications on cohesion and neighbouring networks (Gau, 2014; Völker et al., 2016), capacities to organize around interests (Carbone and McMillin, 2019) and crime prevention (Brunton-Smith et al., 2018). While this literature is valuable for demonstrating that collective efficacy could yield such statistical results, it was less clear on how. Trust remained an important variable measured by a scale of reported strength, but was no longer at the core of theorizing (Small, 2017). Scholars measured whether people entrust others with something (a key, a pet, a loan), but seemed less interested in how people arrived at reporting to trust others. Trusting tends to be studied as a self-reported personal feature of which people happened to have more, or less.

Yet people’s routes to arrive at trust are highly diverse, and stigmatization works as an institutional mediator (Alvarez and Ruiz-Tagle, 2022). The theoretical debate on trust outside of urban sociology ranges from philosophical texts to game theory and statistical applications, as Gambetta’s (1988) collection showed, and peaked at the same time as social capital debates. Especially through the influential work of Hardin, the debate has since arrived at the insight that trust is not a personal property. Trust, the ‘property of interpersonal relations’ in which people took risks of ‘each other’s failure of betrayal’ (Tilly, 2005: xii), requires a ‘common sense epistemology’ (Hardin, 1993: 507–508). To trust that someone will act in the interest of our welfare is always an informed bet, but not only about the qualities of the trustee (as popular in game theory and rational choice work on social capital). Hardin argues that survey questions on who we trust and how much do not address trust as an act, but evaluate trustworthiness of agents abstractly. In everyday life, these evaluations draw on what we have learnt thus far. The act of trusting consists of attributing value of ‘worth to trust’ to a relationship. We learn trust not only by socialization, but also through experiences where we make sense of and accrue value to symbols. Why symbols? Trusting is making an inference about future actions. We do this on the basis of information that is not factual alone: we read practices as ‘good’ for our welfare by a lens of accruing value to what the things we see stand for, or their symbolic relevance. Therefore, symbolic capital may be more important than the literature currently acknowledges.

But states construct national unity through minoritizing specific groups that only then come into being as groups, as Gutiérrez Rodríguez (1999: 161) wrote. So when Hardin (1993: 527) describes trust as the end of an initial scepticism when first entering a relation, which fades as ‘we’ get to know others, he does not account for the historically racialized and colonial nature of encounters (Costa, 2019). We do not all enter first encounters from the same positions. While class and other categories also matter, people with bodies othered as non-white (as general norm, Guess, 2006) and in a homogenizing way (Lutz, 1991: 262) enter first encounters with whites differently from people with white bodies because of the suspicion that is there before they entered (Anderson, 2021; Puwar, 2004). Hardin sees how an agent can become distrustful but ignored that certain categories imply suspicion and distrust in the very construction of the category itself. Put concretely, a white body enters a room of white bodies as potential trustee, a migrant woman enters the same room first as suspicious or ‘degraded’ body (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 1999: 14–16), so what symbolically happens next cannot be the same. How, then, do people trust when entering relations in which scepticism is embedded historically in gendered and racialized exclusions? The Stadtteilmütter, who were women residing in stigmatized neighbourhoods in intersection with racialized identities as ‘migrants’, can help us reflect on the symbolic capital entailed in such relations.

We derive the concept of symbolic capital from Bourdieu-inspired scholars in discussions separated from the studies of measurements of social capital (Harrits and Pedersen, 2019; Jarness, 2017). Threadgold (2020: 94) summarized Bourdieu’s concept as ‘essentially an affective power that (. . .) is the ability to make the world in one’s image; to make an impression, to move easily through institutional spaces’. Bourdieu and Wacquant (2013: 296) wrote that boundaries between groups in society’s hierarchies exist objectively (material properties differ between groups, including economic, political and cultural capital) but ‘contrasted classifications and representations produced by agents on the basis of a practical knowledge of these distributions’ provided symbolic capital. Inscriptions of such hierarchies ‘set limits on how bodies and dispositions can accrue value in different fields and mechanisms of exchange’ and ‘what systems of exchange enable some characteristics to be read as good/bad, worthy/unworthy’ (Skeggs, 2004: 23). As value attribution is not fixed, symbolic capital follows from the ‘production, use and circulation’ of ‘moral sentiments, emotions, and values, norms and obligations in social space’ (Fassin, 2009: 1257). One such space constitutes a ‘domestic’ field of value accruing that differs from accruing value in state institutions. Domestic logics produce value in a parallel lane to institutional logics of street-level bureaucrats.²

A renewed consideration of symbolic capital in the concepts of social capital may help to better understand the workings of trust. The workings of trust, in turn, influence why building networks alone is not enough, but may turn into building bridges without traffic.

The Stadtteilmütter

We draw on empirical data of a study in a subsidized housing estate from the 1960s, built around a courtyard in Berlin, Germany. On the ground floor, The Hub offered state-funded community development activities. Since its founding in 2017, social worker Eileen,³ a woman in her 40s whose parents had immigrated from Turkey, managed it and hosted the Stadtteilmütter project. The Stadtteilmütter and the Hub were complemented by other projects under the ‘Social City’ umbrella. With statistics on, among others, unemployment (11.3%), migrants (73.7%) and recipients of income support (62.1%), the city classified the neighbourhood as ‘area with particular need of support’, eligible for this neighbourhood programme (IHEK, 2019: 3). We were told that a substantial number of families have a temporary residency status. This forbids employment, limits access to higher education and property-ownership and requires regular renewal of immigration status. Social exclusion, especially of youth, followed from low formal education, language barriers and racism (Blokland and Šerbedžija, 2018). The local administration described the neighbourhood as an ‘area of concern’ and its youth crime as ‘worrisome’. Youth workers, social workers, police, the elementary school and the local government held various round-tables in the last years dedicated entirely to the ‘problems of the neighbourhood’. The area appeared regularly in local news on crime. This external reputation (Permentier et al., 2008) or territorial stigma (Wacquant et al., 2014) framed all citizen–state relations.

Funded by the city as a charity in this and other districts, Stadtteilmütter should ‘support orientation’ of migrant women and act as ‘examples’ (Haarbach, 2022). In our neighbourhood, the women were employees of a charity. Initially it had a year’s training and then a payment for each family that was successfully visited 10 times. Over time, women got regular job-contracts and 200-hours-training. The project aims to incorporate migrant families ‘as quickly as possible’ in their district’s ‘educational, pedagogical and health system’ (Gesemann et al., 2020; Koch, 2009). ‘[Stadtteilmütter] are examples (. . .) for how a self-defined life is possible, and meanwhile support thousands of families’, praised a district mayor (Schilp, 2022). A newspaper reported: ‘The women should hinder (. . .) that families retract, lock themselves in a parallel society (. . .) become unreachable for society’ (Bernewasser, 2016). Women reported to the newspaper that they had become Stadtteilmütter as they sought work but lacked required qualifications, enjoyed giving support as they had already been doing in other ways and liked working with other women. Researchers attested that the women ‘blossom[ed] immediately’ because of new social ties and hope to be ‘better mothers themselves’ through the qualification (Macher, 2022) especially when they had not worked before (KUKON, 2022).

A nation-state’s work to produce ‘good migrant mothers’ is a topic widely discussed by other scholars (for example for women in circular migration by Lutz, 2016 or for Polish women in the UK by Erel, 2011). This production was organized around themes to be addressed with every family, including health, language training and schooling but also addiction prevention and sexual development (Kast, 2006). The programme defined ‘good mothers’ as open to public institutions instead of inwardly family-oriented (Bernewasser, 2016) and taking ‘advantage of further counseling and educational offers’ (Kast, 2006:17) by the state. It follows guidelines of bilingual education and mutual respect: ‘The mothers should understand that education starts already at home’: children should learn two languages at home, always be spoken to ‘softly and quietly’, and be treated ‘on eye-level’ (Plahl, 2018).

An evaluative study showed that the Stadtteilmütter increased the network strengths and sizes and diminished conflicts. Going with clients through ‘tunnels of administration’, Stadtteilmütter ‘help reduce the hurdles of the clients’ to formulate concerns to state agents, and, the study claims, help ‘open’ local institutions by creating ‘understanding for the life-worlds and needs of migrant women’ (Sülzle et al., 2019:3). Berg et al. (2015) found self-reported positive effects among clients, but low numbers of reached families. Koch (2020) worried that a ‘new category of social workers’ grew: cheaper than workers with social work degrees, but less professional. Sülzle et al. (2019) suggested that mixing of private and formal ties made the work burdensome. Our findings relate to this.

Methods

This article draws on three months of fieldwork in summer 2020 in the neighbourhood courtyard and community centre. Our research team has had various projects here over the last five years. During the pandemic, we acquired funding from the Berlin University Alliance for a qualitative case study, complementing a quantitative study on urban life under COVID-19 (Vief et al., 2024). Our fieldwork, mostly conducted by Hannah Schilling and Nina Margies, consisted of participant observations, brief on-site interviews⁴ and longer interviews with three social workers, six Stadtteilmütter and two round-tables with local social agencies for which we had constructed an interview guide together, drawing on our initial fieldwork experiences. We transcribed all interviews and wrote extensive fieldnotes. We created a MAXQDA database for manual coding around the broad themes of social capital, trust, care and institutional and domestic logics. Our interest concerned primarily the standpoint of community development workers, not residents. We address how their positions, as women with migration biographies and neighbourhood residents, mattered to the gendered accruing of symbolic value. We do not engage with migration as a research topic and leave aside the important body of literature on migrant women’s personal experiences and life conditions (Erel, 2009; Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 1999; Nordberg, 2015).

We wanted to explore frictions between domestic logics and state logics under the COVID-19 restrictions of March 2020. Overnight, the state ordered local organizations to close to the public. The projects in the Hub, as we knew them before the pandemic, depended on face-to-face, casual interactions in its rooms and the estate’s courtyard. We suspected that the local situation produced consequences of the lockdown different from those in affluent neighbourhoods. We also wondered how community development organizations adjusted. This interested us for the German public discussions at the time, but this article reflects our theoretical interest. It therefore takes the context of the pandemic as a particular historical moment but does not engage with other scholars’ excellent work on the consequences of the pandemic (Willers, 2024), nor discuss the pandemic in Germany (Naumann et al., 2020). Street-level bureaucrats conduct work vis-a-vis their organizational hierarchy (Lipsky, 1980), but also emulate (Tilly, 1998) expectations about clients from previous experiences and contexts. We hypothesized that during COVID-19’s lockdown, the incongruence between residents’ life-worlds and bureaucratic logics, which we wrote about elsewhere (Blokland et al., 2024), would become more clearly visible. The COVID-19 lockdown inspired us to return to this site and study its impact on the neighbourhood. We hoped to highlight the ambivalences that we had started to see in the community work of the Hub and the Stadtteilmütter before the pandemic. This allowed us to further explore our idea that scholarship on social capital, especially in the context of neighbourhood-based community development, may gain from more attention to symbolic capital.

Analyses

Building Symbolic Capital by Emotion Work

As the Hub’s manager, Eileen had built many relations around the centre. Her body piercings, black makeup, tattoos and work biography as former pub owner defied stereotypes of ‘the Turkish woman’. We read her lifestyle markers as visualizations of her bridging role: clearly not an observing traditional Muslim, or an ‘Alman’ (e.g. white German) but visibly ‘literate’ in Berlin’s activist community work. Eileen saw her work in terms of responsibility to ‘take care’ of the residents: ‘there are 3800 people living here. And it is my task to focus on everyone and all issues.’ Initially, she thought she ‘would do this with [her] left hand only’. After seven years, she reflected:

I’m exhausted [. . .] because of my personality, I’m giving much more than I should [. . .] so it takes the upper hand quite quickly. [. . .] I am a very warm Mensch and very strongly build on relationships. Like, I need relationships to do my work.

For Eileen, the qualification necessary to do so was a personal, moral quality, which residents had to recognize and attribute value to, not professionally acquired skills. She used her warmth to build relations but drained her personal resources: ‘as I have a relationship to the people here, they don’t always see me as a social worker, but rather as a family member or friend. And then naturally themes and expectations emerge, that sometimes are very, very burdensome.’ Eileen illustrated this with a mediation of a tenants’ conflict, which turned out to be a family feud where she was ‘stuck with the two families’:

Really also the emotionality behind it, the tears that I have dried. Ehh. . . the suffering of the children who suffered so much from this entire family war. Like, I really get to know too many details. Let me put it like that. Had I been sitting in an office somewhere as a social worker, I would only get the facts on my desk. Here, however, I don’t just get the facts, I get the entire. . . the entire gulf that’s in the back of it all.

Eileen explained: would a parent enter a Jugendamt [child protective service] office with a child with school problems and respond to ‘what is the problem’ with ‘math’, one would ‘lie a little’, but the case worker would take care of the math problem – and only work with ‘facts’: ‘That doesn’t mean that I think this is right, because I definitely think that this gulf behind the curtains plays the major role to resolve the [factual problems].’ Eileen differentiated facts and issues such as the lived experiences of domestic violence, poverty and exclusions through legal status restrictions. Facts as constructed in report cards, degrees, apprenticeship certificates, psychological and remedial test outcomes and the like are signifiers of accrued value of compliance or instead deviance in society. The institutional logics required case workers to only define such facts to then take care of registered deficits. Their logic did not assume trust, only confidence in the adequacy and competences of professionals. In contrast, in the Hub, values accrued in relationships included sympathy, empathy and care – the values that make us feel that a social space transmits trustfulness. Eileen had noted that her personality brought her to engage deeply, but as sociologists, we also see a different logic of meaning making – and symbolic value.

Doing things ‘depends not so much on intrinsic capacity, or even upon dispositions or habits, but on the ways in which the world is available as a space of action, a space where things “have a certain place” or are “in place”’ (Ahmed, 2007: 153). The space of the Hub mediated between the institutionally administrated facts-as-problems, categorized according to the state’s paragraphs and regulations, and Eileen’s work through improvisations, partial story-telling, reputation making, shame, secrecy and casual banter and joking. Such work drew on meanings attributed to emotional practices and bodily presence. Eileen brought warmth, the habit of keeping secrets and balanced asking with not-asking. She worked in the contact zone of bodies as she dried tears and embraced people. This brought her ‘behind the curtains’.

After the Hub’s COVID-19 closure, Eileen shared her telephone number with residents, who contacted her day and night. Long phone-calls of people in isolation blurred the boundaries (even more) between ‘working with facts’, and emotion work. Eileen accrued value through practices that carried warmth, a symbol of friendship or family. The symbolic meaning of heartfulness as an emotion allowed the emulation of other learnt experiences: as we learn to see such warmth as a symbol that people care about our welfare, the inference follows that we can trust. But the families increasingly dissolved the boundary between Eileen’s personality and her professional identity. She separated the ‘behind the curtain’ from the formal categorizations of ‘facts’, but her holistic approach came with a continuously felt experience of boundaries being crossed. This depleted her emotionally, even though the trust that she was entrusted with was what she had invested symbolic capital for in the first place.

Navigating Trust between Domestic and Institutional Logics

As an institution, the Stadtteilmütter programme assumed that in certain neighbourhoods, migrant women needed help to enhance parental skills, an assumption also common in other places (e.g. Bauer, 2017; Erel, 2011) and for lower social class (Cooper, 2021) although sometimes seeing a push-back, as Kerrane et al. (2024) show for British-born Southeast Asian mothers. At the time of our fieldwork, the COVID-19 restrictions allowed meetings outside with more than two persons, and the Stadtteilmütter workers gathered outside of the Hub at fixed times to offer advice. One of them, Sheila, explained that ‘building trust’ to help women ‘open up’ was a necessary ‘first step’ in her work. Many women with whom she worked were reluctant to share problems because they feared state interventions. The Stadtteilmütter programme premised that the clients were deficient in their uptake of state programmes for children and youth (and did not expect them to challenge such devaluations, as Erel (2011) found in her study). However, eligibility required them to share more than a problem being ‘math’. Among each other, in domestic logics, women thought trusting state agents was impossible. They experienced primarily a punitive state. For example, families on social security income (Bürgergeld), especially when refugees (Etzel, 2021), lived under continuous surveillance and threat of payment-cuts when filling out the wrong form, not giving the full and correct information at the proper moment, not reporting a change in the household in time and so on. Schools worked with threats of suspension and other exclusions when children did not behave according to established norms. Parents not attending parent–teacher meetings did not receive their children’s report cards. Women were supposed to know infant vaccination schedules and initiate regular dentist visits on their own initiative and faced judgemental comments from health care staff when they delayed appointments or had wrong information. The German symbolic practices of mothering properly in relations with the state draws on extraordinary implicit knowledge (Blokland, 2024).

The Stadtteilmütter worked in a domestic logic, which framed state presence as threat and truth-telling to state institutions as risk. They had to engage with mothers on eye-level, as migrants and as mothers. But they could not be ‘friends’. The social support network of mothers around the Hub and the courtyard-oriented built structure also meant that reputation making and breaking through gossip always had to be taken into account, as in any network with high density and a local base. So, the workers had to create a social space where things could be told without fear for reputational damage in the domestic logics and without consequences of interventions – for example by the Jugendamt. Sheila therefore saw value in being welcoming and open:

I was in the family centre one day, and a mommy came down [. . .] I didn’t know her [. . .] she was so ready and done somehow, in my view, that I said: ‘would you like to wait a little here? You are welcome to come in, have something to drink.’ [. . .] and then she suddenly hugged me and cried, which was new to me, too. Maybe because I had been close with her and welcomed her nicely.

Sheila used her professional position to suggest trustworthiness through secrecy (e.g. the ability or habit of keeping secrets, Simmel, 1906) in relation to possible reputational damage:

I told her ‘when you like, you are welcome to talk to me. And that will stay between us here. We work here. Or you can simply sit here and calm down’ and then ‘if something is the matter, then just say so. When you’d like to talk about it.’ You are not supposed to put pressure. They have to arrive first, don’t they (. . .) I talked with her, and she was much calmer.

While Sheila stressed distance from domestic logics by pointing out that she was there to work, it remained emotional work of care:

It ought to be this way (. . .) it is what one needs. I mean (. . .) not simply saying something like: ‘well, what’s the matter with you then?’ But that you communicate the feeling that one will be listened to, even when you don’t need to know immediately what’s going on. But that she just simply feels well.

Sheila attempted to create a trust relation by stressing that it was her work, so that she could be expected to keep secret whatever the woman confided in her. In other settings, Stadtteilmütter maintained a distance from institutional logics. They then acted as mothers, downplaying institutional links to not be seen as professionals in direct communication. They sometimes hid the ‘name badge’ that they had to wear to not stand out. Professional ‘help’ would immediately suggest hierarchy and distance, so they preferred to talk about their work as ‘support’. Shirin explained: ‘aid is too much referring to problems, support sounds better, because it means you can still make the future good. There is more promise in it, the promise of improvement.’ But they also talked about avoiding to produce friendship through help, shielding themselves against assumptions of reciprocity (Gouldner, 1960). As long as they were not offering help, no debt was created in social capital’s give-and-take. As long as practices of the Stadtteilmütter were enabling rather than caring, and encouraging rather than giving, they involved emotions without the symbolic economy of indebtedness in favour banks that is characteristic for social capital ties: one peer supported another, but the first one did so as a job. The Stadtteilmütter’s institutional affiliation helped to accrue value in interactions with other mothers. People recognized and greeted them. And while they sought not to be seen as aid providers, ‘one knew what they have done to help’ without expectations of returns. Shirin felt that people knowing who she was because of her work gave her status: working for others in the neighbourhood, supporting and caring, helped her achieve a situational respectability (Skeggs, 2004). This demonstrates the working of symbolic capital: Shirin and Sheila had their cultural capital – their professional positions – recognized in the neighbourhood and used it as an affective power in building relations (Threadgold, 2020: 94).

The women, however, found it not easy to ‘move easily through’ (Threadgold, 2020: 94) between the social spaces with domestic and institutional logics. Sabina developed stomach problems, which she ascribed to stress: caring for her household, children and her ‘clients’, she had little time ‘for herself’, as she always put ‘a lot of heart’ into her work. The use of Whatsapp and people calling her at night, uncommon before the pandemic, brought ‘stress in her head’. It was ‘emotional’ that so many people wanted something from her. Her boss always told her not to answer phone-calls or read messages after 5 p.m., but that was ‘simply not possible’. Sabina noted that she knew that it was ‘her own responsibility’ to ignore the calls and messages, but she would lose ‘people’s trust’ if she would do so. Besides, most ‘really urgent and important’ situations needed immediate support. Shirin, with a Kurdish background, shared a story of support she had offered to a (another Kurdish) client who had recently moved to Germany and had not known anyone to illustrate that for her, too, responding after working hours was not feasible, but unavoidable. Setting limits as the institutional logics required was difficult. Shirin applied the cultivating of an aspect of an ethnically based identity that Erel (2011: 698) identified as culture work or Inowlocki and Lutz (2000: 307) described as a trace of ‘self-referential truth represented by numerous phantom constructs in all kinds of communication of culturalized ethnic difference’. In her ‘culture’, Shirin said, it was ‘more open’ and people spoke ‘with their heart’. She had to explain to the Kurdish newcomer that she could not be with her in all situations as ‘here, regulations and laws are like this’ and that everyone had their jurisdiction. She could not always support in every field. This implied negotiating respect while upholding a professional attitude: ‘Otherwise, [the Kurdish newcomer] would say that the only Kurdish woman she had met in Berlin did not help her.’ A formal restriction – do not reply after 5 p.m. – might thus have worked seen from the logics of the employer, but not from the domestic logics through which the Stadtteilmütter created symbolic capital by being present, available, listening and caring. Paid only for specific hours, they could not restrict work to these hours without damaging symbolic capital – reputation – on which they must draw to build social capital, or bring traffic over bridges. Trust resulted from endurance to make themselves, as persons, available and from engagement beyond ‘facts’. Denying support could jeopardize the relational maintenance of trust.

Symbolic Capital in Context

The acts of gaining reputation and respect are contextualized by the disadvantaged neighbourhood with its stigmatized external reputation and the lack of value ascribed to the women’s positions on other scales as part of broader ‘minoritization’, in which all institutions that participate ‘encapsulate migrants and their lived practices in an ethnic semantic’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 1999: 161–162, our transl.). Ula shared that working as a Stadtteilmütter made her ‘stronger’. So did Sabina, who had worked for 12 years as a teacher in Iran. She had not converted her degree, as she would not be able to teach with her headscarf (outlawed in Berlin public schools). As Stadtteilmütter, she had become ‘someone’ again. As her colleagues knew she was a teacher, she received much respect.

Things worked differently where Stadtteilmütter went with clients to access state services, which do not ‘expect a foreigner as their discussion-partner’, as Gutiérrez Rodríguez (1999: 193, our transl.) already observed in 1999 and Helma Lutz described in her study on migrant social workers as early as 1991. In such institutions, the Stadtteilmütter downplayed personal connections to clients and reduced emotional engagement. Sheila was Muslim and wore a veil, ‘that [is considered as] the metaphor for the cultural and religious strangeness of Muslim immigrants’ (Lutz, 2001: 225). She told us about a visit to the ‘Job Centre’, which administers social benefits, known to be hard to access. Sheila had learnt to always mention her professional role and the name of the Charity: as a person she would not be read in her right place. She needed to explain herself to the street-level workers to negotiate access to this institution, which tries hard not to open its doors to persons, but attempts to stick to facts of cases with case numbers: ‘When I say I am Stadtteilmütter, maybe that works differently, when I say I am Stadtteilmütter from [name of Charity] it works differently again, because [the Charity] is well-known.’ Once, the Job Centre’s case worker had wondered about her competences:

I was there a few times and [the case worker] had recognized [me] right away. I do not know, maybe I come across as so neutral. Finally, [the case worker] looked at me and said ‘what is your profession?’ because I did not have a name tag. We are always obliged to carry an ID, so we can identify ourselves. Then the case worker said ‘I knew right away that you had something, because you made direct eye contact [. . .] your attitude was so confident, when you talked you were so sure of yourself somehow, you came across as very confident in your attitude.’

A female, migrant body (the embodiment of culturalized and ethicized difference, see Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 1999: 166), was read as ‘confident’, which required explanation, while the white body was in place. The inhabiting of street-level bureaucracies in Berlin remains predominantly white, ingrained in specific categories of what is normalization as organizational principle (Lutz and Wenning, 2001: 17). The case worker reasoned from the habits of this world. The symbolic value that Sheila acquired in this situation reinforced the institutional understanding of migrant women as not outspoken or well-informed. The case worker’s question ‘what is your profession?’ suggested that Sheila’s self-confidence required an explanation. Sheila felt recognized in her professionality. Yet, this moment also showed that the institutional logic framing the interaction assumed whiteness as standard and implied what was ‘in place’ and what ‘out of place’ (Ahmed, 2007: 153) and appeared in this case to have not changed much since scholars like Gutiérrez Rodríguez (1999) and Lutz (1991) embarked on discussing this.

Conclusion

With the advancement of community development programmes in European cities, social capital became a central concern to implement asset-based programmes in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. We noted that while such programmes continue to rely on notions of social capital, the initial conceptual centrality of symbolic capital has become less pronounced. We believe that we should put symbolic capital back in our toolbox for understanding community development initiatives – and why they may fail to achieve substantial change.

The women in our case study drew on emotion work to accrue symbolic value. Their visibility in the neighbourhood brought respect in congruence with domestic logics. At the same time, they used the institutional logic of professionalism to navigate away from reciprocal helping relations. But their work required an enduring, and therefore draining investment of emotional resources. While they developed symbolic capital, they showed how building trust relations caused exhaustion and depleted their emotional resources. When it became too much, their work organization told them to detach and limit their availability. Yet as mothers from the neighbourhood, their work positioned them as mediators between state agents with institutional logics and local mothers with domestic logics. Their speciality was the creation of ties and accruing of value through emotional labour. Detaching to avoid depletion of the resources they needed to be professionals, which would hence mean a reduction of symbolic capital that was needed to form trust relations.

Outside of the neighbourhood, their experiences of respect within institutional logics derived from being noted as exceptional. This points to the racialized or ethicized institutional logic that understands migrant women from disadvantaged neighbourhoods as docile, soft-spoken and bureaucratically incompetent, also observed by other scholars. While the Stadtteilmütter project can be said to have other strengths, our analyses shows that networking for social capital was hampered in its effectiveness by its inherent ambivalences of symbolic nature. The women workers certainly gained respect. But as the institutional logic only drew on their emotional resources as mothers-to-mothers and ‘from the neighbourhood’, it also reified the conditions of disadvantage. Ironically, for the women to keep doing their work, the neighbourhood must continue to be classified as ‘disadvantaged’ and in need of community development, and the local migrant mothers in the neighbourhood as not-yet competent. Building bridges between domestic logics and institutional logics to generate trustful interactions where state institutions do not do so, cannot challenge structural inequalities of gendered and racialized spatial disadvantage. As long as institutional logics do not change, disadvantaged neighbourhoods may remain pockets of disadvantage in endless need of ‘community development’.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: we acquired funding from the Berlin University Alliance for conducting this qualitative case study.

Notes

Talja Blokland is Professor of Urban and Regional Sociology at Humboldt University of Berlin. She writes on community, trust and public space in the unequal city, urban marginalisation and neighbourhood change, urban safety, and institutional inequality mechanisms. She is author of the books Community as Urban Practice (Polity Press, 2017), Urban Bonds (Polity Press, 2003) and co-author of Creating the Unequal City (Ashgate, 2016) and Networked Urbanism (Ashgate, 2008). She is former president of RC21 Urban and Regional Sociology of the ISA (2018–2023), and currently member of the ISA Executive Committee.

Hannah Schilling is Head of Studies for Sociopolitical Youth Education at the Evangelische Akademie Berlin. She is author of the book Globalized Urban Precarity in Berlin and Abidjan: Young Men and the Digital Economy (Manchester University Press, 2023) and co-author of Creating the Unequal City (Ashgate, 2016). Schilling has conducted research and published on topics such as global sociology, social inequalities, urbanity and youth as well as the social challenges of digitalization.

Nina Margies is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Sciences at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is co-founder of The Urban Transcripts Journal, an open access journal on urban research. She is author of the book Emotions in Crisis (Bristol University Press, 2024) and co-author of Bodycams bei der Polizei Berlin und der Berliner Feuerwehr (Law & Society Institute Berlin, 2024). Her work focuses on the role of individual and collective emotions, social change and crisis as well as urban organizations such as the police and fire brigades.

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