Abstract
Research on prosocial organizing has made great strides in understanding how organizations foster durable social change through core work directly targeting specific beneficiaries (e.g. work integration), and also through community work to obtain the cooperation of key stakeholders. Yet, extant research tends to focus on community work that is closely related – or proximal – to core work and is thus weakly equipped to explain how seemingly unrelated, distal community work unfolds. To address this puzzle, we study an Italian work integration social enterprise that engaged in anti-Mafia work to support its core work of reintegrating people with mental health issues. We unveiled the process whereby it came to engage in this distal community work, how this work facilitated the destigmatization of the beneficiaries and, ultimately, their reintegration in the community. We contribute to the literature on prosocial organizing by providing a more complex and nuanced view of the relationship between core and community work, as well as how to manage stigma.
Introduction
Research on prosocial organizations like non-profits, social enterprises or community-based enterprises, though fragmented, has traditionally devoted its attention to the activities through which these organizations affect social change by means of technical solutions such as work integration, provision of healthcare services or educational programmes (Alvord, Brown, & Letts, 2004; Ansari, Munir, & Gregg, 2012; Stephan, Patterson, Kelly, & Mair, 2016; Wry & Haugh, 2018). This core work encompasses activities or services directed to an organization’s beneficiaries, typically disadvantaged segments of the population (Battilana, Sengul, Pache, & Model, 2015; Haugh, 2005; Qureshi, Sutter, & Bhatt, 2018).
Yet, durable social change occurs only when it overcomes the temporary nature of an organization’s activities and is supported and enacted beyond the realms of a single organization – such as in local communities (Lumpkin, Bacq, & Pidduck, 2018; Mair & Seelos, 2021). Hence, beyond core work, research on prosocial organizing has also examined activities performed in the organization’s broader community aimed at creating a facilitative context to advance a social mission (Chatterjee, Cornelissen, & Wincent, 2021; Ho & Chan, 2010). For work integration social enterprises (WISEs), for example, this could mean working towards improving acceptance in the community of the disadvantaged they employ, who often suffer from stigmatization (Krupa, Sabetti, & Lysaght, 2019; Lysaght, Jakobsen, & Granhaug, 2012).
The related understanding is that social issues are complex and their resolution requires community work aimed at inducing the cooperation of a variety of stakeholders (Lumpkin & Bacq, 2019; Seelos, 2020; Wry & Haugh, 2018). Yet, extant research has mostly investigated cases whereby this cooperation is obtained via proximal community work, or work directly related to the issue in question – such as forming a shared understanding of undesired facets of the issue – which make support for prosocial activities more appealing to relevant stakeholders (Mair, Wolf, & Seelos, 2016; Tracey & Phillips, 2016). For instance, Mair and colleagues (2016) found that tackling inequalities in India required the cooperation of higher-caste members who opposed equality goals but who coalesced around the fact that giving access to water sanitation to low-caste members was needed if they wanted to drink uncontaminated water and retain their purity. Therefore, extant research cannot satisfactorily explain how community work would unfold when it is seemingly unrelated to a social problem – what we call ‘distal community work’ – and being conducted in the belief that it will be effective in prompting cooperation by relevant stakeholders on the focal social problem. For instance, the NGO Harlem Children Zone’s mission is to develop capabilities in disadvantaged children through various stages of educational development (Ebrahim & Rangan, 2014). However, the NGO also engages in disparate activities for adults aimed at healing the entire community (Whitehurst & Croft, 2010) to achieve its mission focused on children. Our research is, thus, important theoretically as distal community work can entail many activities, related to varying degrees to the core social mission and helps inform the understanding of the complexity of prosocial organizing. In this paper, we seek to advance the understanding of how prosocial organizations solicit cooperation through distal community work. While the reasons for engaging in proximal or distal community work are the same, that is, they aim to bring about social change, we ask how distal community work unfolds and how it is leveraged to advance a social mission.
To do so, we studied an Italian WISE which decided to engage in anti-Mafia activities to overcome the stigmatization, and foster the social reintegration, of its beneficiaries – people with mental health issues. In tackling the presence of the Mafia through community work, the WISE aimed at strengthening solidarity, typically discouraged in communities where the Mafia is present (Natale, Arcidiacono, & Di Martino, 2013; Putnam, 1993) to make the community a more welcoming context for the social reintegration of its beneficiaries. Such distal community work was initiated by the WISE’s response to the stigmatization of its beneficiaries: redirecting stigma towards truly dangerous community actors (i.e. the Mafia). Second, we found that distal community work took the form of two sets of relational activities aimed at fostering solidarity in the community: creating space for interaction on properties confiscated from the Mafia and supporting entrepreneurs who denounced Mafia extortion. We also show how this distal community work bolstered two typical destigmatization processes: contact between beneficiaries and other community members who coalesced for unrelated reasons, and reconstruction as role models whereby beneficiaries were portrayed by the WISE as active protagonists in the fight against the Mafia, acting for the good of the community – in overt contrast with the stigmatizing beliefs of them being socially dangerous. Finally, we show that distal community work, by bolstering destigmatization, enabled the durable social reintegration of beneficiaries in the community, as mirrored in their capacity to interact meaningfully with other community members.
With this paper we contribute to research on prosocial organizing in local communities and on stigma management strategies. First, by conceptualizing the construct of distal community work, we extend research on prosocial organizing in local communities on the need to organize for a facilitative context (Lumpkin et al., 2018; Mair et al., 2016; Mair & Martí, 2009; Spear & Hulgard, 2006; Tracey & Phillips, 2016). In so doing, we join the conversation on how durable social change is achieved in local communities (Ebrahim & Rangan, 2014; Mair & Rathert, 2020; Wry & Haugh, 2018) and point to the fostering of solidarity as important groundwork (Daskalaki & Kokkinidis, 2017). Second, we advance scholarly research on how organizations manage stigma, such as with boundary management strategies (Clair, Daniel, & Lamont, 2016; Garcia-Lorenzo, Sell-Trujillo, & Donnelly, 2021; Moon, 2012; Zhang, Wang, Toubiana, & Greenwood, 2021). The latter are discursive strategies whereby ‘actors attempt to construct boundaries between insiders (those who are stigmatized) and outsiders (those who are not)’ (Zhang et al., 2021, p. 195). We unveil redirecting stigma as a new form of boundary management strategy. While previous research has informed on how these boundaries can be constructed by drawing equivalences or by celebrating positive differences between the stigmatized and those who are not, redirecting stigma draws boundaries between those who are unjustly stigmatized and those who are unjustly not stigmatized, but should be (i.e. the Mafia).
Theoretical Background
Prosocial organizing in local communities
Research on prosocial organizing has intensified over the last three decades (Battilana & Lee, 2014; Stephan et al., 2016). Major domains of interventions typically relate to poverty, inequalities, poor access to health services, limited access to markets or jobs – being dealt with by, for example, engaging in a variety of core activities such as work integration, provision of health care services, assistance with entrepreneurial initiatives as well as psychological counselling, legal help and the like (Alvord et al., 2004; Lumpkin & Bacq, 2019; Mair, 2020).
In addition to this core work directly focused on the beneficiary, prosocial organizations often carry out complementary supportive work in the community, with this latter considered to be the level at which social change occurs (Haugh & Talwar, 2016; Lumpkin et al., 2018; Mair & Seelos, 2021). Community work is often necessary because social issues are complex and multi-faceted and their resolution requires the cooperation of a variety of stakeholders (Seelos, 2020; Wry & Haugh, 2018). Lumpkin and Bacq (2019) identify three major stakeholders whose cooperation is crucial: the community, including the beneficiaries themselves; those who provide financial, technical and political support; and enterprises, which generate income and sustainable solutions. For instance, in an attempt to mitigate poverty and inequality, the cooperation and involvement of beneficiaries was necessary and was pursued through community ownership of the social programme, such as Gram Vikas’s 100% participation initiative (Pless & Appel, 2012). The support of stakeholders with resources is often obtained by creating shared interests and an understanding of the causes of a given social issue – as well as the adequacy and practicability of the envisioned solutions (Lumpkin & Bacq, 2019; Mair & Seelos, 2021; Seelos, 2020). Accordingly, positive societal impact is achieved when communities, supporters and enterprises purposefully collaborate (Lumpkin & Bacq, 2019) to address a social issue or some of its facets.
A major concern has been to understand how to gain the cooperation of relevant stakeholders in the community (Di Domenico, Haugh & Tracey, 2010; Mair, Martí, & Ventresca, 2012; Ruebottom, 2013). In some cases, cooperation requires overcoming the resistance of community members who refuse to change the status quo or accept it as unavoidable (Chatterjee et al., 2021; Mair et al., 2012, 2016; Qureshi et al., 2018). This stream of research, however, has tended to study cooperation of community stakeholders obtained via efforts devoted to form shared understanding and/or shared interests around a core social issue’s desired or undesired facets. For instance, while Gram Vikas overcame the resistance of high-caste members in relation to the undesired consequences of lack of access to water and sanitation by low-caste members (Mair et al., 2016), the WISE studied by Tracey and Phillips (2016) overcame community resistance by reframing migration in positive terms for the local economy. Therefore, extant research cannot satisfactorily explain how community work would unfold along activities that are more distal from a core social problem. Not unlike other forms of intervention, distal community work is expected to be effective in prompting the cooperation of relevant stakeholders. Thus, while the antecedents for engaging in proximal or distal community work are likely to be similar, we still have little clarity about how distal community work unfolds and how it is used to advance a core social mission (in our case, the social reintegration of stigmatized people). Answering these queries would enhance our understanding of the many ways prosocial organizations attempt to obtain cooperation from relevant stakeholders by creating value through context (Lumpkin & Bacq, 2019; Seelos, Mair, Battilana, & Dacin, 2011), hence making progress on a core social issue.
On the reintegration of stigmatized people
When reintegrating disadvantaged people, the cooperation of the community at large has been found to be particularly relevant. To this aim, prosocial organizations carry out community work that facilitates encounters between the disadvantaged and community members (Leickly & Townley, 2021; Roy, Donaldson, Baker, & Kerr, 2014). Disadvantaged people, in fact, often suffer from stigmatization which hinders their social reintegration and can also carry negative consequences for the organizations helping them (Tracey & Phillips, 2016). While stigma is a mark of undesired differentness (Goffman, 1997), stigmatization is the social process by which people are made to ‘feel [. . .] stigmatised [as] a consequence of social comparison’ (Coleman Brown, 2013, p. 148).
Regarding people with mental health issues, a prevailing stigmatizing belief is that they are dangerous (Corrigan & Bink, 2016). Their destigmatization refers to ‘the process by which low-status individuals or groups gain recognition and worth in society’ (Lamont, 2018, p. 420). Research in social psychology has found that contact-based approaches produced the best results in comparison to other destigmatization strategies – such as protests aimed at chastising offenders for their negative attitudes and behaviours or education programmes aimed at dismissing stereotypes with factual information (Corrigan & Bink, 2016). Thus, sustained contact with the community may significantly reduce mental illness stigma (Leickly & Townley, 2021) and social enterprises can play an important role here (Farmer et al., 2016; Roy et al., 2014). Extant research has investigated how WISEs do so, for instance, by hosting community events such as concerts that bring the beneficiaries and the community together and help the latter ‘develop a positive impression of the business and its workers’ (Lysaght et al., 2012, p. 460).
To summarize, previous literature has argued that the community at large is a key stakeholder for the reintegration of stigmatized people and that contact-based approaches (to our knowledge, based on proximal community work) are most effective compared to other destigmatization efforts such as protest strategies and educational programmes.
Methodology
We undertook a qualitative study of Nuova Cucina Organizzata (henceforth NCO, i.e. New Organised Kitchen) which provides job opportunities and other core services to people with mental health issues in a region of Southern Italy, and which also engages in the fight against the Mafia to foster beneficiaries’ social reintegration. We thus focused on uncovering the social processes whereby such distal community work unfolded, for which the case study methodology is deemed appropriate (Yin, 2017).
Research context
In 2007, NCO opened a social restaurant to employ people with mental health issues as waiting staff and to reintegrate them in the community. While providing job opportunities undoubtedly enhances the capabilities and wellbeing of beneficiaries, work integration might not, per se, be conducive to social integration – especially if these individuals are severely stigmatized (Krupa et al., 2019). Moreover, NCO had been heavily influenced by, and relied on, a biopsychosocial perspective on health drawn from systems theory (Nese, 2018). Accordingly, individuals’ health is affected by a variety of non-medical factors which the World Health Organization calls social determinants of health, such as early childhood development, income and social protection, and housing, among others. As per the biopsychosocial model, in addition to medical treatment a person needs to have accommodation, a job and a set of social relationships (Nese, 2018). To secure these, the model prescribes relying on a plurality of local public and private actors, for instance physicians, the family of the beneficiary, social enterprises – charged with offering care, employment and potentially accommodation – as well as on the community at large.
Being socialized in such model, NCO’s members were very concerned about the presence of the Mafia, as it affected the social determinants of health in the community. For instance, to secure its power, the Mafia typically works to undermine social capital (Gambetta, 1988; Putnam, 1993; Solino, 2008). Mafia presence also deteriorates the environment, for instance the quality of public constructions and places – which are important sites for social gatherings and thus relevant for building social capital (Brain, 2019). As a testimony to the poor quality of life in the territory, the province where NCO is located is consistently ranked among the worst in the country by the leading Italian business newspaper, measured according to a variety of social, health and economic factors.
Data collection
We collected interviews, archival and observational data which cover the years since the inception of NCO in 2007, up to October 2012. Table 1 gives an overview of the data collected.
Data Sources and Their Use in the Analysis.
First, we collected 30 semi-structured interviews with relevant actors, conducted on site in 2013 and which lasted between 20 minutes to two hours each. We conducted interviews with members of NCO and also with other relevant stakeholders of the WISE, such as anti-Mafia and healthcare actors and commercial partners. Interviews with the latter were crucial to understand, complement and expand on how NCO’s community work was conducted. For instance, interviews with anti-Mafia actors (e.g. public prosecutors, the local referent of the major anti-Mafia NGO in Italy and the President for the valorization of properties confiscated from the Mafia) were extremely useful to understand how the work of NCO complemented theirs. Interviews with healthcare actors were important to better understand how NCO’s work had supported the reintegration of beneficiaries. During the review process of this paper, we conducted seven additional follow-up semi-structured interviews via phone which lasted between 18 and 43 minutes to obtain further details and clarifications. The total amount of interviews is thus 37.
In addition to interviews, we collected archival data on NCO’s activities in the form of, among others, internal documents, organizational brochures, press releases, books, videos recorded during public events as well as communications posted on their webpage and on Facebook. These data informed us on NCO’s activities and the reception by community members and other relevant stakeholders starting from the launch of the restaurant in 2007 up to 2012. We also read two books on the biopsychosocial model, one explaining the model (Righetti, 2014) and the other discussing its results in the region, with a dedicated chapter to NCO (Mosca, 2018). In total, archival data amounted to more than 1500 pages and more than 180 minutes of video recordings.
Finally, the first author conducted two weeks of fieldwork in 2013. During this stay, the author observed the beneficiaries at work, ate at the restaurant where they were working as waiting staff, attended NCO internal meetings – as well as a cultural event organized by the WISE – and engaged in conversations with people living in the area and NCO members. These observations allowed us to become more familiar with the context and strengthen our understanding of NCO’s community work and how it unfolded.
Data analysis
We analysed data following an inductive method aimed at theory building (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Data analysis encompassed four major stages, which took place recursively and is summarized below.
Stage 1
Following guidelines for case study research (Yin, 2017), we developed an event history database based on our interviews and archival data (Table 2). The timeline points to a series of events informing about NCO’s core and community work.
NCO timeline.
Stage 2
We then undertook a first-order analysis through open coding of our data (Van Maanen, 1979). We coded for the different types of activities NCO carried out and observed outcomes. As typical at this stage, this step produced several dozen first-order codes which were then reduced through the nesting and overlapping of similar codes (Clark, Gioia, Ketchen, & Thomas, 2010).
Stage 3
We then moved to axial coding to establish links among the first-order concepts to derive second-order themes (Locke, 2001). In this stage, we engaged in interpretive efforts and iteratively went back and forth from data to theory (Suddaby, 2006). For instance, upon opening the restaurant, NCO was confronted with the stigmatization of the beneficiaries by the neighbours who considered them dangerous and who disapproved of their proximity. It was only after we strengthened our theoretical understanding of stigmatization and destigmatization by consulting research on social psychology (Coleman, 2013; Corrigan & Bink, 2016) and organizational research on stigma (Hampel & Tracey, 2017; Tracey & Phillips, 2016; Zhang et al., 2021) that we could more clearly interpret NCO’s response – which we labelled redirecting stigma towards the Mafia as a form of boundary management strategy (Zhang et al., 2021).
Stage 4
In this stage, we compared and contrasted the elicited themes to understand their potential relationships and build a theoretical model. Finally, to strengthen the trustworthiness of our findings and to make sure our interpretations were accurate, we relied on data triangulation across different sources and ‘member checks’ with organizational members (Battilana et al., 2015).
Findings
In this section we present detailed findings on how distal community work came about, unfolded and its effects with regard to NCO’s core social mission. We detail the resulting theoretical model in the discussion.
Beneficiaries’ stigmatization
Upon opening the restaurant, the WISE was confronted with community opposition of members who feared proximity to people with mental health issues. This opposition reflected the stigmatizing belief that people with mental health issues are dangerous. The local community thought of them as ‘some sort of Hannibal Lecters’ (#ID1, Manager) and said ‘[they] would have never allowed a madhouse in their garden [. . .] and refused any contact with us’ (#ID5, Educator). As explained by the individual responsible for communication:
The first year was difficult because the neighbours were fearful, they didn’t even want to talk to us, stuff like that [. . .]. In this territory, a person born with an issue like a physical problem or a mental problem was marginalized and considered a different person from others. (#ID8)
Redirecting stigma
Obviously, non-cooperation by the community would have been problematic for any WISE, and particularly so for an organization deeply socialized into a model that emphasized the importance of the environment. Moreover, as social programmes are finite in duration, the members of the WISE thought they could not ‘protect [the beneficiaries] with a golden bell forever’ (#ID1, manager). Thus, the members of the WISE thought they would not have obtained great results without the cooperation of the community – ‘had we just created a happy island among us’ (#ID6, educator) – and that ‘taking care of individuals required taking care of the community where individuals live’ (#ID2, manager).
When a notorious Mafia boss who had been hiding only a few metres away from the restaurant was arrested shortly after the opening of the restaurant, the members of the organization thought they ‘had to show the community the nonsense of fearing people in need while giving hospitality to criminals’ (#ID7, responsible for communication). The manager said that ‘[he] did not know whether the neighbours actually knew [that a Mafia boss was hiding nearby], but he was there and the neighbours were saying “no” to our guys!’ (#ID1). More explicitly, the manager explained:
After the arrest of the fugitive, we wondered ‘how can it be that our community perceives us as the dangerous people?’ We just wanted to help people amid a difficult moment. Instead, our community [. . .] was giving hospitality to people who had decided to belong to organized crime. (#ID1)
The WISE decided to redirect stigma from their beneficiaries to the Mafia, that is, from the unjustly stigmatized to those who were truly dangerous and deserved to be stigmatized but were not. NCO did so in several ways. For instance, it chose a name that ironically revisited that of a notorious Mafia clan operating in the territory in the 1980s, i.e. New Organised Camorra where the “C” of Camorra became Cucina (i.e. kitchen in Italian). Furthermore, in public events and other occasions NCO ironically and outspokenly differentiated its members from those who were truly dangerous: ‘While the Mafia got organised to destroy this territory, we are a group of crazy people who got organised to improve life in the territory’ (#V2, promotional video).
In so doing, NCO wanted to contrast how beneficiaries were treated and perceived relative to organized criminals:
When we started, we found our community was upside-down: it had been giving hospitality to people who were destroying our future [the Mafia], and it was rejecting people for [health] problems that can occur to anyone. (#V2, promotional video)
As these quotes illustrate, redirecting stigma to the Mafia allowed NCO to avoid blaming community members for the lack of solidarity they displayed in stigmatizing people with mental health issues by drawing on ubiquitous community knowledge about the Mafia’s destructive presence. Having redirected stigma from beneficiaries to the Mafia, NCO then engaged in community work that took the form of anti-Mafia work. We conceptualized such community work as distal because, although ‘it was undertaken to help [their] guys’ (#ID2, manager), it did not directly relate to NCO’s core work as a WISE whose efforts are targeted on its beneficiaries, rather aiming at helping community members by tackling the presence of the Mafia.
Distal community work
We found two main forms of distal community work that NCO undertook. Before describing them in detail we shall stress that both forms, again, reflected NCO’s socialization into the biopsychosocial model, leading them to tackle the deteriorated state of relationships in the community – for which the WISE blamed the Mafia and its pervasive individualism. This ‘gave [us] an interpretative lens’ (follow-up interview with manager) which drove NCO to tackle the issue of the presence of the Mafia as an intervention aimed at strengthening solidarity in its community:
The cure for people with mental health issues and the fight against the Mafia seem to have nothing in common. But to care for individuals we need strong communities. This is not the case for communities who accept the Mafia. (#ID1, manager)
In the media, NCO’s manager reported that ‘[they] understood that to take care of an individual you need to take care of the context where this person lives. And in [their] case, [they] have the issue of the presence of the Mafia’ (#V4, local media video). As also reported by the referent of Libera, the prevalent anti-Mafia association in Italy, NCO’s peculiarity consisted in ‘understanding the cure for disadvantaged people as an intervention that required the transformation of the social context in which it was operating’ (#ID10).
Creating space for interaction in the community
First, NCO opened space to socialize community members to inclusive alternative relationship models vis-a-vis those entailed by Mafia’s individualism. To do so NCO leveraged properties confiscated from convicted Mafia criminals, public properties that no one had been using. No other social organizations had taken advantage of them because of the risks involved – ‘the Mafia continues regarding [the properties] as theirs well after confiscation’ (#ID9, Libera’s member) – as well as their costs as these properties needed significant refurbishing after years of abandonment.
While NCO used a confiscated property to increase the number of accommodations for its beneficiaries who did not have a place to stay (a form of core work aimed at beneficiaries), NCO also leveraged this resource in its community work. For instance, NCO destroyed part of the perimeter wall of the property – creating holes that allowed trespassing – as ‘the wall is a divisive element’ (#OA7, PowerPoint presentation of the project). Through these holes, neighbourhood children started using the garden of the confiscated property as a space to play ‘as there are not many green open spaces in the area’ (#ID3, manager). As the children started accessing the confiscated property ‘[they] gave us the idea to make this place more and more open’ (#ID7, responsible for communication). For instance, NCO asked for, and obtained, funding for launching a web-based radio station to further foster community gatherings on the confiscated property. This project aimed at involving local teenagers who were charged of running the radio station, ‘as [NCO members] noticed that people feel involved when you ask them to do things’ (#ID2, manager). Similarly, NCO started organizing on the confiscated property a host of cultural and recreational events for the community at large to further socialize community members to the kind of community NCO envisioned – in contrast to that of a Mafia-tainted community. On these occasions, NCO constantly remarked that ‘what must be understood is that what we do [on the confiscated properties] aims at partaking’ (#V8, presentation of the Faber Project), and solicited community members to commit to a different way of being together:
I am pleased to see so many children here, they are the future of this community. [. . .] We want to give them a culture, a way of being together, a way of life different from what they have taught us so far. We would like our tomorrow not to be stained with the blood of innocent people, rather made up of respectable people who do not close their eyes or ears and work to create a better future. (#V3, private video, courtesy of a local journalist)
Creating solidarity networks in the community
Recognizing the ‘fundamental importance of investing on relationships’ (#ID1, manager) also encouraged the creation of formal (e.g. through contracts) and informal (access to social support mechanisms) networks of solidarity in favour of entrepreneurs who dared to denounce Mafia extortion. As reported in an internal document, NCO worked to:
increase the involvement of the territory by extending the participation to other firms and organizations and by creating a formal and informal network that shared the same vision for the development of the territory. (#OA11)
Informal networks of solidarity, for instance, encompassed signing collective denouncements of the Mafia meant to not leave entrepreneurs alone in doing it, and inviting community members to shop from these entrepreneurs as a show of support:
When we talk to companies which have denounced Mafia extortion they say they fear isolation, not the denouncements. These organizations do not have to be left alone, you have to reward them, you need to go shopping from them, you need to support those entrepreneurs because they are fighting a battle for others too. If they succeed, they are conquering a space of freedom also for others. So you need to create a chain of organizations, or simply citizens, who can support the actions of those on the front lines and make certain choices. (#ID3, manager)
As explained by one of these entrepreneurs, ‘what we do with organizations such as NCO is to join forces – because they are excellent at this – to try to improve this territory and help other entrepreneurs denounce the Mafia’ (#ID15, entrepreneur who denounced Mafia extortion). In particular, from its beginning NCO worked closely with two other WISEs managed by relatives and friends who also asked for confiscated properties and ‘shared the same understanding about the role of social organizations – which ought to generate civic engagement and, above all, solidarity in the community’ (#ID26, manager of partner WISE). These partners WISEs obtained agricultural plots to start a social farming business and, over the years, started including the products of other organizations which had denounced Mafia extortion in their most popular commercial activity – in the form of a ‘parcel’, i.e. a Christmas gift box containing products cultivated by the partner WISEs on the confiscated plots under the NCO brand umbrella. The slogan became ‘social economy as an antidote to criminal economy’ (#OA11, NCO internal document) meaning that the solidarity NCO and partner WISEs were fostering was an antidote to Mafia-fostered individualism:
A new model of relationships, not centred on the wild individualism typical of the Mafia’s ‘way of doing things’, but rather centred on ‘doing together’ and capable of building networks that enable people to invest in themselves and to promote the relational good which must be incentivized to build communities alternative to the Mafia. [. . .] A social economy as an alternative to the Mafia economy. (#V7, promotional video)
This work succeeded in fostering solidarity in the community. For instance, when the Mafia destroyed the irrigation pumps on one of the agricultural plots managed by a partner WISE a few days before the harvest, ‘by their initiative, neighbouring farmers made their irrigation system available to water peach trees and to harvest’ (#ID23, manager of partner enterprise) – ‘this gave us an immense boost’ (#ID3, manager).
Destigmatization processes
We found that such distal community work bolstered the destigmatization of beneficiaries in two ways: first, through contact by increasing the interactions between beneficiaries and community members and, second, by reconstructing the former as role models. We examine both processes in detail below.
Contact
Community work bolstered NCO’s efforts to foster better interactions in general as highlighted above, but also between people with mental health issues and the community at large. For instance, the cultural and recreational activities organised on confiscated property made it ‘just’ a meeting place, as per a book reporting on NCO’s work:
In the months I spent as a guest at the confiscated property, I was incredulous. The properties where people who used to live in protected structures, today are open to the community: places where social and cultural activities are organized or simply where people meet. (#OA19)
As reported by NCO’s manager, ‘[the activities] brought the community closer to the guys and prevented them from living in a small nuthouse and allowed them to interact with the community and be involved in activities and everything else’ (#ID2). For instance, allowing the kids to access confiscated property created ‘for our guys, the [socializing] opportunities that make everybody feel equal’ (#V8, presentation of the Faber Project). The mother of a beneficiary reported that ‘at the beginning we were worried, then we saw that the local boys [playing in the confiscated property] invited our son to eat chips with them!’ (#ID30).
Thus, organizing activities for the community on the confiscated property created the relational space that allowed community members to coalesce on the premise of the organization. This enabled the increase of the number and quality of contacts between beneficiaries and community members, thereby overcoming the distance and fear many had at the outset:
Taking care of the confiscated properties and of issues of general interest has favoured us in gaining the attention of people who were not interested in the reintegration of people in need. But on topics of collective interest concerning their own community, they came. [. . .] You need to create opportunities where communities can forge their relationships and increase opportunities for aggregation and participation. [. . .] The more these things are available to the community members, the better for them and the more they will tend to include others because they themselves feel included. (follow-up interview with manager)
Reconstruction as role models
The beneficiaries were presented as the protagonists of the anti-Mafia work and as ‘anti-Mafia actors who protect their community’ (#OA26, minutes of an official meeting with local authorities). First, while NCO and partner WISEs involved the beneficiaries in the re-use of confiscated properties, the latter showed extraordinary commitment. For instance, the manager of a partner WISE recalled seeing one of the beneficiaries running away at night; only afterwards he understood that this beneficiary’s father was a farmer who passed on to him the task to check the plots at night. Testimony of this involvement and related commitment, the products contained in the parcels sold in 2012 displayed the images of beneficiaries while harvesting. Together, NCO and its beneficiaries ‘were lending a hand during the harvest’ (#ID27, manager of partner enterprise) in the spirit of collaboration which characterizes these WISEs.
Despite the stigmatizing belief of being dangerous, one beneficiary even obtained honorary citizenship after offering to become the guardian of the confiscated property following verbal intimidation by the wife of the Mafia boss. He said, ‘if not us, who else is going to stay?’ (#ID2, manager). As reported in the letter to the municipal council:
We ask for the bestowal of honorary citizenship to [name of the beneficiary] [. . .] For his courage, for being committed and involving others in liberation activities such as those carried out on the confiscated property, for acting as a role model for the whole community [. . .] and for representing the kind of active citizenship willing to engage in social, cultural and legality paths. (#OA15)
In so doing NCO not only helped the beneficiaries through work integration and other activities, but ‘[they] put them as a bow that breaks through the waves for the development of the territory, which is a completely different concept’ (#ID6, educator). In the press, NCO was indeed described as ‘the social enterprise which makes disabled people become protagonists [in the fight against the Mafia]’ (#MA5, local press).
All in all, this construction of beneficiaries as role models for the amelioration of the community stood in overt contrast with the label of socially dangerous people. As a result, the beneficiaries also started looking at themselves in a highly positive way:
If not for NCO, all these people with problems would never have been perceived in any other way because maybe people, at first glance, see the problems and not the person [. . .]. I think what NCO does, what we do, is against the Mafia because the Mafia does not help others. (#OA19, book reporting on NCO’s work – emphasis added)
Beneficiaries’ social reintegration
As a key outcome we found that distal community work, through destigmatization, fostered the attainment of NCO’s core social mission: beneficiaries’ reintegration. For instance, the referent of Libera reported that, during an event organized on the confiscated properties, ‘we saw these guys who used to be interned and considered socially dangerous dancing with the local kids – now among us, celebrating together positive experiences on confiscated properties’ (#ID10). Moreover, thanks to the community work undertaken and by ensuing destigmatization, people with mental health issues not only started interacting autonomously in the community, but even began to be sought out by local community members: ‘the community started taking care of the guys’ (#ID8, responsible for communication) and ‘being worried when they did not see them around for a while’ (#ID19, social worker). At the local café, if people with mental health issues started making a bit of fuss, the owners would not say ‘do not bring them here any longer’ (#ID2, manager). As reported by the father of a beneficiary, ‘the improvements [in social interactions] were huge’ (#ID29), and that ‘[name of the beneficiary] was mingling. . .everyone greeted him [. . .], stopped to talk with him. . .and not just with him but also with other people with difficulties’ (#ID30, mother of a beneficiary). A healthcare administrator reported that ‘NCO has given people with mental health issues a normal life’ (#ID16) and, during fieldwork, the sister of one of them told us that NCO literally saved her brother’s life. These significant improvements were also documented in formal evaluations as per the minutes of the Integrated Evaluation Unit contained in a book reporting about NCO:
Mr. [. . .] suffers from personality disorder and mystical hallucinations. To the question ‘how were you doing before?ʼ he answers ʽjust meʼ and to ‘what do you miss from the past?ʼ he replies ʽtoday is better! I wash myself, have breakfast, take my medicine, go to the cafe, everyone knows me in the village. They greet me and offer me a cigarette. Things are better.ʼ Mr. [. . .] had lived of expedients and had been subjected to various treatments that had not resulted in any improvement and, instead, had caused the patient to oppose any solution proposed by the healthcare services. (#OA19)
All in all, thus, the ability of the beneficiaries to interact with, and being cared for, the community at large marked a significant change compared to the past, leading NCO to joke about the fact that ‘all the desserts offered to the [name of the beneficiary] at café, had made him gain weight’ (#MA13, national press). In the words of an NCO’s educator:
Today we take it very much for granted, but for those who come from outside it is not obvious that people who used to be in psychiatric wards now go out to get a coffee. This is routine for us now, in fact, the opposite would seem weird. (#ID5)
Epilogue: Cooperation as a result of positive community change
While distal community work facilitated the social reintegration of people with mental health issues, it also helped make significant strides in the cultural fight against the Mafia which, in turn, resulted in the cooperation of important local stakeholders. In the press, NCO and partner WISEs were reported doing ‘the anti-Mafia of facts [. . .] which helps transform these territories’ (#MA8, national press). A local healthcare administrator in charge of the reintegration of marginalized people said that:
NCO advocates legality through the re-use of confiscated properties and employs people with difficulties in projects aimed at valorizing confiscated properties. It is not easy to find all this in only one actor. NCO embodies the concept of collective good very well. . .at 360 degrees. I cannot separate NCO’s activities in healthcare from those carried out to boost legality, neither can I give more weight to one compared to the other. (#ID17)
Another local healthcare executive allocated two voting seats to members from NCO and partner WISEs on the local third-sector council. More generally, NCO’s manager reported that ‘after seeing the positive impact on the territory, people started calling us asking how they could lend a hand’ (#V5, local TV). This broad cooperation, particularly that of powerful politicians and organizations committed to the fight against the Mafia, allowed NCO to benefit from a regional law that established the biopsychosocial model as a valid tool for the valorization of confiscated properties (Regional Law n. 7/2012). In addition, it was also thanks to the pressure exhorted by some politicians, including the President of the valorization of confiscated properties that, after over two years of protests, the biopsychosocial model went from being an experimentation to being a formally regulated model in the Region (Regional Law n. 1/2012).
Discussion
We set out to build theory on the processes underpinning a prosocial organization’s community work distal to its core work – as opposed to the typically proximal community work studied in extant literature. We now elaborate on the model which emerged from our findings.
As portrayed in Figure 1, prosocial organizations often face the stigmatization of their beneficiaries by the local community (arrow i). In these cases, beneficiaries’ social reintegration is hindered and typically leads prosocial organizations to engage in stigma management responses (arrow ii) (Clair et al., 2016; Corrigan & Bink, 2016; Zhang et al., 2021). NCO’s response is a new type of boundary management strategy for the stigmatized vs the non-stigmatized, whereby NCO redirected stigma towards other targets in the community. It decided to redirect stigma to notoriously harmful community members, i.e. the Mafia, which had impoverished the local community by fostering individualism and damaging social ties. This response was influenced by NCO’s socialization into a healthcare model which took in great consideration social determinants of health (arrow α). Thus, while NCO could have undertaken proximal community work, it decided to deal with problems distal to beneficiaries which, nevertheless, mattered for their reintegration – according to NCO’s view.
A model of distal community work.
Distal community work (arrow iii) substantiates relational activities aimed at ameliorating social relationships in the community. First, it used properties confiscated from the Mafia to create space for meaningful community interactions. This served the purpose of exposing community members to alternative ways of relating to, and socializing, in spite of Mafia’s individualism. Second, NCO worked to create both formal and informal networks of solidarity to further foster the community model they envisioned. This translated into supporting entrepreneurs who had denounced Mafia extortion as ‘an act of freedom’ for the whole community – one that would thus strengthen community relationships towards greater solidarity. Overall, these two relational activities socialized community members to the practice of inclusion, which was key to facilitating the destigmatization and acceptance of their beneficiaries by the community.
Distal community work bolstered two key destigmatization processes previously described in the literature: contact and reconstruction (arrow iv). First, distal community work broadened the depth and frequency of social interactions between beneficiaries and other community members, who ultimately coalesced on the premises of the organization for reasons unrelated to the reintegration of people with mental health issues per se and were socialized to inclusive relational models. As shown in social psychology, contact is key in destigmatizing people with mental health issues (Corrigan & Bink, 2016). Second, distal community work allowed NCO to portray beneficiaries as role models firmly committed to improving the community, in overt contrast to the community’s initial perception of them being socially dangerous people. Such stigma management strategy has been discussed as reconstruction, that is, ‘actors attempt to reshape values, meanings or interpretations of stigma to repair stigmatised identities or construct new identities (Zhang et al., 2021, p. 197). Importantly, reconstruction of beneficiaries’ role by NCO was not aimed at normalizing beneficiaries or making them fit as equals to community members that initially stigmatized them (i.e. ‘they are like us’). Rather, it sought to revert their role from undesired, different people to role models, thus still emphasizing differentness but in a desired way.
Finally, these destigmatization processes led to durable social change in the form of reintegration of people with mental health issues, as mirrored by their renewed ability to meaningfully interact with other community members (arrow v).
With this model, we make two contributions. First, we contribute to our understanding of community work by prosocial organizations and its role in fostering durable change in the lives of beneficiaries and the communities they inhabit (Lumpkin et al., 2018; Mair et al., 2016; Mair & Martí, 2009; Wry & Haugh, 2018). Extant research has mostly studied supportive work in the community with activities related to the prosocial organizations’ social mission and framed as being in the interest of relevant community members – what we referred to as proximal community work. We extend this research by eliciting the construct of distal community work as an additional mode for organizations to create a facilitative context for their social mission. Regarding social reintegration of stigmatized people, distal community work, like proximal one, aims to reduce the distance between the beneficiaries and the community at large to dispel stigmatizing beliefs (Farmer et al., 2016; Ho & Chan, 2010; Lysaght et al., 2012). Moreover, both types of community work activate two typical destigmatization processes., contact and reconstruction. Here, we have shown how distal community work, when skilfully leveraged, can substantially bolster these processes. Distal differs from proximal community work as it moves away from dysfunctional dyadic relationships (beneficiaries vs community, or stigmatized vs stigmatizers) to focus instead on relational dysfunctions in the community, such as lack of solidarity which, like other facets of social capital (e.g. trust), can substantially foster cooperation in the community (Putnam, 1993). Distal community work, thus, unlike proximal community work, does not merely foster inclusive interactions between two targets, i.e. the beneficiaries and the community. Rather, it aims at fostering broad inclusiveness at the community level as an indirect, yet more powerful and durable way to support beneficiaries’ reintegration as it entails (potentially) positive community change. Fostering solidarity in the community was important groundwork without which NCO would have been far less effective had it engaged, from the outset, in destigmatization processes (e.g. contact, reconstruction) because the community was unsupportive and unwilling to even consider interacting with the organization and its beneficiaries. This stands in contrast to the proximal work examined in the extant literature, that engages directly in destigmatization through, for instance, contact strategies (e.g. Lysaght et al., 2012).
Moreover, our study points to two relational activities aimed at fostering solidarity in the community and, eventually, also generating cooperation from key stakeholders. We regard creating space for interaction as particularly interesting, especially when this entails the repurposing of unused public properties as this points to the relational value of the latter – which transcends their material or practical dimensions. That prosocial organizations valorize public properties is not uncommon (Haugh, 2005), yet NCO used them not just for accommodation, but also to reduce the relational distance between the beneficiaries and the community and to promote relationships impinging, more broadly, on solidarity. This can be considered a form of relational bricolage which complements other forms of bricolage such as material (Baker & Nelson, 2005) and ideational (Mair & Martí, 2009).
It can be argued that engaging in distal community work is rather challenging as it entails a set of complex, additional activities for a prosocial organization. Yet, if skilfully carried out, distal community work can not only bolster destigmatization processes as shown, but can also enhance the overall social value created by the organization in a community, thus increasing local stakeholders’ cooperation with the organization. Future research could build on our study to further shed light on the various ways prosocial organizations go about fostering a facilitative context by strengthening their, and others’, bonds in the community: including the types of relationships they manage to create for the beneficiaries and how this helps achieve durable social change in the lives of beneficiaries and the communities in which they live.
Second, we contribute to research on stigma management responses (Garcia-Lorenzo et al., 2021; Tracey & Phillips, 2016; Zhang et al., 2021). The strategy of redirecting stigma we uncovered is a new form of boundary management strategy which constructs boundaries between the stigmatized and those who are not. Unlike the strategies described in previous research (Clair et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2021), the strategy of redirecting stigma does not aim at comparing or contrasting the stigmatized and the stigmatizers, rather it brings focus on who is unjustly stigmatized and who is unjustly not stigmatized but should be (i.e. the Mafia). Redirecting stigma is, thus, a form of boundary management strategy that draws distinction between who should be perceived as dangerous. It also non-confrontationally tackles unjust negative perceptions of the stigmatizers, by problematizing the state of relationships among community members arising from the presence of organized crime. Indeed, our findings point that the target of stigma redirection should be consensual for the stigmatizers and related to a problem of shared concern in the community.
Regarding reconstruction, this form of stigma management strategy typically results in an improved sense of self (Levine & Schweitzer, 2015; Zhang et al., 2021). Differently from previous research which informed that reconstruction is used to reframe stigma in a positive light, denying it, or to refocus on non-stigmatized aspects of beneficiaries’ identity, the strategy of reconstruction as role models aims to convey an impression of positive differentness – as role models who work for the betterment of their community vis-a-vis ‘normal’, if uncommitted citizens. The involvement of beneficiaries in conducting distal community work is crucial and this insight adds to extant research on the need to involve the beneficiaries as active actors in improving their lives and community life (Fajth, Bilgili, Loschmann, & Siegel, 2019; Pless & Appel, 2012).
As a final note, in this paper we show that destigmatization of people with mental health issues entailed boundary management, contact and reconstruction strategies. As it is important to investigate destigmatization in relation to a specific type of stigma (Hampel & Tracey, 2017), Zhang and colleagues (2021) suggest that, when the source of stigma lies in belonging to a category of people deemed inferior or discredited (called tribal stigma, p. 194), destigmatization is particularly difficult to eradicate as visible by ongoing manifestations of racism, sexism, etc. Yet, previous research on social psychology and prosocial organizing has pointed to the particular effectiveness of contact-based strategies (Corrigan & Bink, 2016; Lysaght et al., 2012; Roy et al., 2014). Hence, and in light of our findings, we see a wide scope for future research to broaden our understanding of stigma management strategies based on relational work.
Concluding remarks
In this paper, we aimed to advance the understandings of how a prosocial organization engages in a form of community work distal from its core social issue. Our findings understandably raise generalizability questions. First, we argue that distal community work broadly aimed at tackling dysfunctional relationships and increasing community solidarity is effective in bolstering destigmatization processes also in other contexts where solidarity, in particular towards disadvantaged people, is lacking. Indeed, it is not rare that prosocial organizations face stigmatization against their beneficiaries (Shier & Handy, 2015; Tracey & Phillips, 2016). Second, regarding the strategy of redirecting stigma, while it can be argued that organized crime only affects some communities, the social construction of protagonists and antagonists is far from uncommon (Ruebottom, 2013). Moreover, for NCO, the Mafia is an extreme expression of individualism, which capitalism also fosters and which former research has indicated could be the crux of alternative and effective counter-organizing for prosocial organizations (Daskalaki, Fotaki, & Sotiropoulou, 2019; Parker & Parker, 2017). Likewise, the reconstruction strategy we found does not require addressing a threatening community issue (as in our case), but a deeply felt one, whose mitigation can be framed as a result of the substantial involvement of beneficiaries.
In concluding, we argue that distal community work can facilitate typical destigmatization processes in several other settings where beneficiaries are stigmatized by local community members, given that there are plenty of opportunities for ameliorating life in a community and involving beneficiaries in these endeavours.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.