The contradictory field of community organizing in the United States: A theoretical framework

Abstract

The urban studies and planning literatures largely conceive of community organizations as either clients of neoliberal regimes or the advocates of marginalized communities. Whereas the first emphasizes structural constraints, the latter focuses on the conditions that permit organizations to exercise agency in planning arenas. This theoretical paper suggests that both frameworks reveal important mechanisms but belie the contradictory pressures facing community organizations. We turn to organizational and social movement literatures to argue that community organizations face two competing forces stemming from resource needs. First, they need money to maintain a staff and finance basic operations. As these are nonprofit organizations, money typically comes from external private and public grants. Second, for communities to support organizations and delegate them representative functions, the organizations need to be considered legitimate by the community. Though community organizations need both money and legitimacy, these resources conflict with one another. Too much dependency on external funders can undercut an organization’s legitimacy to represent community interests in an autonomous and unconflicted way. Too much autonomy from external funders can enhance the legitimacy of organizations, but it can also result in financial destitution. Thus, rather than conceive of community organizations as structural puppets or the voice of the people, we suggest that most are positioned in a contradictory field that pulls them in conflicting directions.

Keywords

community organizations legitimacy organizational field resources representation

During the 2010s, a community organization in the city of Long Beach, California advocated for more resources and support for Latino neighborhoods. Not only were Latinos facing greater threats and harassment from the federal government, but the city’s Latino community was also living in overcrowded housing and underserviced neighborhoods. The city responded by providing the organization with a grant to support a job training program and English as a Second Language classes. As this community organization drew in more city resources and developed stronger relations with elected officials, its relation to constituents in the community became more complicated, especially when activists from more radical community organizations called on the city to adopt a ‘sanctuary city’ ordinance and to defund the city’s vast police department. These demands and the more radical organizations leading the campaigns gained increased popularity in the city’s Latino and Black communities. Elected officials balked and turned to the established Latino community organization with which they had strong relations. The officials sought to have this organization speak in support of the city’s half-hearted measures in various public forums, including city council meetings. This Latino community organization found itself in a seemingly irreconcilable dilemma: aligning with the community activists and criticizing the city would vex elected officials and place its future grants at risk. But supporting the city over community demands would open it to criticism from its radical flank and place its legitimacy with the community at risk. Competition from the organization’s more radical flank sharpened the dilemma by drawing increased scrutiny from patrons and constituents to how this organization was fulfilling its role.

How can we theorize the dilemmas facing this and many other community organizations involved in planning and policy work? The urban planning and urban studies literature on community organizations is theoretically and empirically rich, but insights into the contradictory pressures precipitating complex dilemmas are incomplete. Much of the literature adopts dichotomous framings of community organizations. A top-down framing of community organizations emphasizes the constraints imposed upon them by the neoliberal state (Arena 2012; McQuarrie and Marwell 2009; McQuarrie 2013; Laskey and Nicholls 2019) while a bottom-up framing highlights the capacities of community organizations to serve as the voice of marginalized urban communities and agents of community control (Davidoff 1965; Arnstein 1969; Healy 1992; Sandercock 1998; Beard 2003, Miraftab 2009; Friedmann 2011). Scholars on both sides of this analytical divide have produced revealing accounts, but left apart, they provide only partial insights into the contradictory positioning of community organizations.

Other scholars have moved beyond this dichotomy and placed organizational dilemmas at the center of their analyses. Organizations are entangled in many different relations that place conflicting pressures on them (Elwood 2006; DeFilippis et. al. 2006, 2007, 2010; Trudeau 2008a, 2008b, 2009; DeFilippis 2012). This results in practices (e.g., hybrid practices, code-switching, insider-outsider strategies) that mediate between different expectations and pressures. This strand of literature is important because it allows us to break out of the impasse of top-down and bottom-up approaches and points to factors (i.e., complex relations) responsible for the dilemmas facing organizations. However, this literature focuses primarily on organizational tactics and strategies, without fully theorizing how complex relations outside organizations shape individual practices. By analytically prioritizing individual organizations over their complex relations, we do not know how different types of relations generate distinctive pressures, the concrete tradeoffs resulting from dependency on different relations, and pressures stemming from inter-organizational competition. Moreover, we cannot understand how actual contradictions, dilemmas, and practices differ based on the configurations of relations engulfing any given organization. There are certainly common organizational practices (e.g., hybrid practices, code-switching, insider-outsider strategies) that emerge in response to general contradictions. But which of these practices are adopted, how, and to what extent can vary sharply. This strand of literature therefore makes an important contribution but is limited by taking organizations as the primary unit of analysis rather than the complex relations constituting and organizational field.

This paper aims to fill this theoretical gap by adopting the concept of organizational field (McCarthy and Zald 1977; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Bourdieu 1984; Minkoff 1993; Fligstein and McAdam 2011). The concept shifts the unit of analysis from individual organizations to the relations within which they are embedded. The concept highlights organizations operating within a specific arena or issue area (e.g., community organizing) and focuses on how relations between organizations impact the dilemmas they face and strategies they adopt. Building off this literature, we argue that the field of community organizing is structured by vertical and horizontal relations:

1. Vertically: Community organizations depend on conflicting resources from above and below : Money that mostly comes from external benefactors, and legitimacy that comes from the communities that they are supposed to represent (McCarthy and Zald 1977; Walker and McCarthy 2010). Community organizations increase community legitimacy when they express commitments to serve their constituents in an autonomous fashion. Enhanced community legitimacy enables organizations to gain the trust of the community, recruit members, and mount mobilizations. Elected officials and philanthropists also turn to organizations for support that are deemed legitimate because they can serve as gatekeepers and brokers to low-income and marginalized residents. However, community organizations also depend on financial capital from external sources (e.g., government grants, developers, philanthropy) for operations and campaigns. The lack of financial support inhibits an organization from professionalizing and mounting impactful campaigns and significantly decreases the likelihood of organizational survival (Walker and McCarthy 2010).

2. Horizontally: Community organizations within a field compete with other community organizations for strategic resources (money and legitimacy), which impacts how any given organization relates to financial patrons and community supporters (McCarthy and Zald 1977; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Vermeulen 2013). A crowded field compels community organizations to compete more for a limited pool of strategic resources, which can enhance the power of resource holders to compel compliance of dependents. Greater competition also enhances the accountability of any given organization as their practices are likely to be called out by competitors.

Vertical and horizontal relations structure the field of community organizing and place organizations in a contradictory position. Organizations that attract external resources may grow rich, but dependency limits their autonomy and opens them up for criticism. Most organizations are therefore torn between the need to demonstrate autonomous commitments to their communities and the need to stay in the good graces of their financial benefactors. Without the former, these organizations lack the legitimacy needed to be recognized as authentic representatives of their constituents. And, without the latter, these organizations lack the financial capital needed to advocate for their communities. Under conditions of heightened competition for these resources, contradictions can engulf community organizations. This presents constant trade-offs, dilemmas, and uncertainties, requiring them to readjust positions and responses when they veer too far in one direction of the field or the other.

Lastly, most community organizations face dilemmas associated with their contradictory location in the field. But actual contradictions and dilemmas facing any given organization vary by how organizations position themselves with respect to financial patrons and community constituents (some closer to patrons, others closer to the community), on the one hand, and the degree of competition posed by other community organizations, on the other. Given the variations and dynamism of the field, strategic responses are far more differentiated and volatile than those described by the scholars above (i.e., hybrid practices, code-switching, insider-outsider strategies). Thus, by disentangling relations, the concept of field allows us to better theorize both the contradictions facing all community organizations and the mechanisms responsible for variations of contradictions, dilemmas, and practices.

This paper theorizes contradictory relations, but the concept of community organization itself is elastic. It can arguably include the vast panoply of associations in civil society working on local issues, including nonprofit service organizations, homeowner associations, business improvement districts, government subsidiaries, and informal activist associations. Urban planning and urban studies scholars, however, often adopt a narrower understanding, examining the subset of organizations performing advocacy and service in and for low-income urban communities. This paper is speaking to this literature and addressing this subset of organizations. We add that a defining function of community organizations in low-income communities is representative. Democratic deficits and the changing roles of traditional elected officials have combined to make this particular function more important (Levine 2021). Thus, our definition of community organization refers to the array of organizations (e.g., community development corporations, block clubs, religious organizations, nonprofit organizations, etc.) operating in low-income urban communities that purport, at least minimally, to serve as a “voice of the people”.

Top-down and bottom-up approaches to community organizations

Many scholars studying community organizations have framed their interventions through dichotomous analytical frameworks of top-down control or bottom-up engagement.

Top-down approaches to community organizations

Critical urban scholars have long maintained that external forces such as government, philanthropies, and financial institutions have extended control over urban-based community organizations. Over the past 60 years, private and public institutions have invested enormously in organizations working in low-income communities (Piven and Cloward 1979; Castells 1983; Fainstein et. al. 1983; Wolch 1990; Cruikshank 1999; Domhoff 2005; Kohl-Arenas 2016; Levine 2021). National foundations made significant investments in inner city areas from the 1960s onwards (Domhoff 2005; Kohl-Arenas 2016; Marwell, 2004). The Ford Foundation at this time started to fund community organizations in low-income areas that furnished affordable housing and supported businesses. These investments gave rise to a new type of community organization: the community development corporation (Domhoff 2005; Levine 2021). While the Ford Foundation provided early funding to CDCs, the federal government provided additional support through its “Special Impact Program” and Title VII Community Development Program. From the late 1970s onwards, the federal government provided funding through Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) and city officials assumed responsibility for the distribution of funds (Wolch 1990; Marwell 2004; Levine 2021). Lastly, banks provided financial support to CDCs and community organizations to legitimate their own development projects (Dreier 2003).

The advent of urban neoliberalism tightened the institutional cage constraining community organizations (Marwell 2004; Arena 2012; Kohl-Arenas 2016; Levine 2021). Facing fiscal austerity and embracing the principles of limited government, municipalities turned to community organizations to serve as service providers (Wolch 1990; Marwell 2004; Trudeau 2008a). Community organizations that had embraced advocacy were now providing services (e.g., economic development, housing, job training) that had once been provided by municipal governments. These changes homogenized the organizational sector of cities and transformed it into what Wolch called a “shadow state”. In the case of Cleveland, McQuarrie (2013) shows that funders helped fuel the proliferation of community organizations and CDCs during the 1980s and 1990s. Rather than seek out broad change in the urban political economy, these organizations propped up real estate value through neighborhood upkeep and housing programs. In New Orleans, Arena (2012) documents a similar process where once radical community organizations were transformed into compliant housing associations that managed renters in public housing complexes.

The public and private institutions that caged these organizations reduced the margins for resistance and contentious community protests. Organizations that challenged their benefactors could lose substantial funding from public and private benefactors, which would place the survival of organizations at risk (Arena 2012; McQuarrie 2013; Kohl-Arenas 2016; Laskey and Nicholls 2019). Though such institutional constraints mattered, many organizations also adopted their benefactors’ neoliberal worldviews and ideologies (i.e., framings, norms, categories, viewpoints, language, etc.) (Cruikshank 1999). Arena observes that the use of dominant planning culture, norms, and language signaled an organization’s “political maturity”, which could confer more grants, contracts, and political access (Arena 2012: 126). Community organizations have gone on to use dominant language, frames, and norms to communicate with their own low-income members and constituents, normalizing the neoliberal planning culture. Thus, institutional (dependence on resources) and ideological (dependence on ideas) constraints raise the risk for resisting, but also make resistance difficult because the “common sense” of organizations mirrors the “common sense” of their patrons.

In such constrained contexts, community organizations have come to play important supportive roles in neoliberal cities. They play service roles by assuming many tasks that local governments once performed (Wolch 1990; McQuarrie 2013), and they play ideological roles by cultivating consent for the urban status quo (Arena 2012; McQuarrie 2013; Kohl-Arenas 2016; Laskey and Nicholls 2019). For Arena, these organizations form a “protective layer” for urban capitalist development “centered on their capacity to undermine, contain, or prevent the emergence of social movements that challenge the power and prerogatives of the ruling class” (Arena 2012: 28). Rather than represent the interests of their communities, they mystify power relations and cultivate consent.

Bottom-up approaches to community organizations

A bottom-up framework conceives of community organizations as agents of community voice and control. In response to planning’s crisis in the 1960s, progressive planning scholars have since argued that there was need to democratize urban planning (Johnson 2004; Lauria and Schively Slotterback 2020). Whereas certain scholars focused on designing conditions to enhance community voice and control, others focused on organizational capabilities. Scholars adopting such a framework are theoretically and politically varied, with some leaning more toward liberal pluralism and others toward a Marxist-inflected critical urban theory. Most of these scholars also recognize structural constraints on organizations. Despite these considerations, scholars adopting a bottom-up framework draw analytical attention to the conditions and capabilities that enable organizations to become agents of voice and community control in the planning and policy process.

Davidoff (1965) argued that all public institutions – from the courts to electoral politics – in the United States embraced pluralism because it ensured fair representation of interested parties and resulted in optimal outcomes. Urban planning remained the only public institution to reject pluralist deliberation and decision-making. Davidoff maintained that pluralism should be introduced into planning and that different stakeholders should have advocates representing their interests. Just as attorneys advocate on behalf of her client in a court of law, community organizations should serve as representatives of marginalized constituents in planning deliberations. Through an exchange between plural actors, deliberations would result in a better and fairer outcome for all.

The communicative turn in urban planning theory can be considered one theoretical successor of Davidoff’s advocacy planning because of its embrace of plural voices in planning deliberations. Scholars working in this tradition added theoretical depth and precision by incorporating Habermas’s theory of communicative action (Healey 1992, 1996; Innes and Booher 1999; Forrester 2009). By creating egalitarian and open channels between different groups (considered a precondition to “undistorted communication”), participants can exchange interests and understandings coming to recognize the validity of their adversary’s position. This allows stakeholders to forge a fair decision and move towards a common good without domination and manipulation. Healey formulated the argument in the following way:

It involves mutually reconstructing what constitute the interests of the various participants. It is not only innovative, but has the potential to change, to transform material conditions and established power relations through the continuous effort to ‘critique’ and ‘demystify’; through increasing understanding among participants and hence highlight oppressions and ‘dominatory’ forces… (1992: 156)

Communication is not simply a matter of creating consensus for the highest and best use. For Healey and others, it is a process that elevates the power of marginalized communities by revealing, critiquing, and demystifying the power of urban elites.

Other scholars focused on the institutional constraints facing organizations and the conditions needed to elevate voice and control in marginalized neighborhoods. Arnstein argued that organizations can only be effective in the planning process when power has been distributed to them (Lauria and Schively Slotterback 2020). “Participation without redistribution of power,” she famously argued “is an empty and frustrating process for the powerless. It allows the powerholders to claim that all sides were considered but makes it possible for only some of those sides to benefit” (Arnstein 1969: 216). The highest level of community engagement was community control. Such control would provide marginalized communities, or what she called “have-nots”, “the means by which they can induce significant social reform which enables them to share in the benefits of the affluent society” (Arnstein 1969: 217). Though Arnstein diagnosed the problem facing community organizations, she was not clear on how the redistribution of power was to be done. There is an implicit assumption that the liberal state should and could cede power voluntarily.

Scholars working on radical and insurgent planning have built off Arnstein’s important contributions. However, these scholars have argued that organizations need to build bottom-up power outside the state and eventually take power from the state. Friedmann, for instance, distinguishes between two types of planning: planning from the positioning of a rationalizing capitalist state, on the one hand, and planning from the positioning of a relatively autonomous civil society, on the other (Friedmann 2011). Miraftab (2009) adopts a similar framework when developing her concepts of “invited spaces” and “invented spaces”. Invited spaces are state-managed deliberative arenas where community organizations interact with other stakeholders over planning processes and goals. In contrast, insurgent organizations reject these state spaces and create their own “invented spaces”. These are spaces where insurgents can deliberate with other like-minded activists, diagnose problems and solutions on their own terms, and develop suitable strategies for achieving collective ends.

While some have identified the institutional conditions needed for empowered community control, others have focused more on tangible (money, constituents) and intangible (knowledge, legitimacy, social capital) resources. Beard (2006) argues that the uneven distribution of planning knowledge requires marginalized groups to either acquire legitimate forms of knowledge or transform their own “indigenous” knowledge into legitimate knowledge. While Beard’s work has focused on the acquisition of knowledge and skills, others have stressed the centrality of social networks for mobilizing people and pooling other resources (Warren 2001; Nicholls and Uitermark 2016). For instances, strong ties between a wide array of community organizations in south Texas enhanced their abilities to pool scarce resources and deploy those resources in contentious campaigns (Warren 2001). Networks enabled these organizations to accomplish more together than they would have alone, which elevated their position and power in planning and policy arenas. Thus, the capabilities of organizations to represent and advocate for marginalized communities stem from their abilities to carve out their own autonomous or invented spaces (Miraftab 2009) and accumulating cultural (knowledge), social (networks), and economic resources.

Community organizations and complex relations

Other scholars have problematized dualist framings of community engagement and asserted that community organizations face important contradictions stemming from their complex relations to the government, funders, and the communities they serve (Elwood 2006; DeFilippis et. al, 2006, 2007, 2010; Trudeau 2008a, 2008b, 2009). For instance, DeFilippis and his colleagues observed argued, “One of the central problems with much of the work that has been written on community is its tendency to fall into dualistic thinking: organizing or development; consensus or conflict; community or labour; local or larger scale. This limits the potential scope and range of community-based efforts for social change” (2007: 40). Central to this perspective is the recognition that the neoliberal state offloads key service provisions to community organizations for the purposes of reducing costs and shifting accountability away from the government and to the nonprofit sector. This has resulted in fundamental changes in organizational norms, agendas, practices, and staff (Trudeau 2008a: 674) and encouraged community organizations to focus on local problems instead broader political and economic forces (DeFelippis et. al. 2006).

Despite important constraints, community organizations have retained a degree of autonomy stemming from the multiple relationships they maintain with different actors. Ellenwood (2006) notes that the multiplicity of relations (i.e., community and religious organizations, elected officials, bureaucrats, philanthropists, businesses, etc.) generates divergent expectations and ambiguities, which can be exploited by savvy community organizations. DeFelippis and his colleagues (2006: 680) add that embeddedness in conflictual and consensual relations can provide a space for autonomy but the extent of this autonomy remains in question. Autonomy makes deviation from state constraints possible, while the motive to resist and protest stems from ideological and normative commitments. Moreover, “a sense of responsibility to their coworkers, and staff members may also develop a feeling of responsibility to the clients and communities they serve” (Trudeau 2008a: 674).

Relations outside and inside organizations give rise to a common set of tactics, strategies, and practices. Trudeau (2008a; 2008b) maintains that organizations develop hybrid practices, projects, norms, and agendas, or employ their discretion to skirt government rules and regulations. Ellenwood largely agrees with this assessment and observes that organizations also pursue a form of code switching. They develop “flexible” narratives that allow organizations to “strategically navigate the institutional, spatial, and knowledge politics that produce and transform urban spaces, in a way that cannot be solely characterized as either cooptation by or resistance to more powerful state and business interests” (2006: 324). Some community organizations have found the capacity to both mobilize contentious campaigns from the outside while simultaneously negotiating with government officials on the inside. “They organize and do development,” DeFelippis and his colleagues note. “They can be collaborative and consensual, but unafraid of conflict. And they act at a set of different scales, ranging from the community to the city, to the state or province, and global” (Defilippis et. al. 2007: 40). This insider-outsider strategy is born out in many case studies where organizations cultivate mobilization capacities in the civic trenches for the purposes of enhancing leverage at the negotiating table (Warren 2001; Purcell 2003; Nicholls and Uitermark 2016; Pastor 2019).

This strand of literature is vital because it moves beyond the dualism that has long structured the planning literature on community organizations. Community organizations are neither structural dupes nor unfettered agents of change. This literature asserts that relations matter, but what these relations consist of and how they matter remains somewhat of a mystery. This is partly the result of focusing more on individual organizations as the unit of analysis and less on the external relations that shape their tactical and strategic options. Consequently, these scholars can describe responses to conflicting relational pressures (i.e., hybridity, code switching, insider-outsider) but cannot specify the pressures associated with different types of relations (e.g., relations to benefactors, relations to community constituents, relations to other community organizations) and how practices of organizations vary by their embeddedness in different relational configurations.

The field of community organizing: A theoretical framework

We build on the above literature by moving up one analytical level from the individual organization to the “field” of community organizing (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Goldstone 2004; Diani and Pilati 2011; Fligstein and McAdam 2011; Hilgers and Mangez 2015). By focusing on the field rather than individual organizations, our aim is to clarify the relational mechanisms responsible for the contradictions facing community organizations.

What is an organizational field?

Fields consist of multiple inter-connected organizations working in a common area of interest (Diani and Pilati 2011; Fligstein and McAdam 2011; Hilgers and Mangez 2015). Organizations become aware of others through their networks, and they start to resemble one another as they adopt the attributes, practices, and cultures that seem to be succeeding (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Gnes explains, “come to recognise certain organisational forms (or templates) along with their practices and discourses, as being natural within a given order of arrangements” (2016: 1422). Common relations, discourses, practices, and “rules of the game” make one organizational field distinctive from another.

A field is deeply relational. The complex relations constituting a field impact the behavior of organizations in important ways, including its norms, agendas, tactics, and general strategies (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Fligstein and McAdam 2011; Freeman and Hannan 1989; Vermeulen 2013; Freeman and Hannan 1989). Relations within a field are structured through the availability and distribution of resources (Freeman and Hannan 1989; Vermeulen 2013). Resources are derived from relations to different sources, which oftentimes conflict with one another (Hilgers and Mangez 2015). For instance, Bourdieu argued that within the modern field of art, artists depend on both symbolic capital (or legitimacy) derived from fellow artists for their adherence to the principles of “art for art’s sake” and economic capital derived from buyers outside the artistic field (Bourdieu 1994; Hilgers and Mangez 2015). Though both resources are necessary, the sources providing these resources (artistic community and the market) conflict within one another. The accumulation of one resource (financial capital) can cancel out the the accumulation of another (symbolic capital) because when artists profit on financial markets they may be seen as sacrificing their artistic integrity and violating the principle of “art for art’s sake”. Resource scarcity also compels organizations to relate with one another through competition, motivating actors to elevate their deservingness to their benefactors by depreciating (implicitly and explicitly) competitors (Freeman and Hannan 1989; Vermeulen 2013). Lastly, relational dynamics within the field (contradictory resource dependencies and inter-organizational competition) impact relational dynamics within organizations as different groups of actors inside organizations adjust their own internal positions and strategies in response to the shifting balances of power in the broader field (Fligstein and McAdam 2011).

Thus, drawing on these insights, we suggest community organizing constitutes a distinctive type of field, organizations depend on resources from their relations with conflicting and contradictory sources, and inter-organizational competition exacerbates contradictory tendencies.

Community organizing as a distinctive organizational field

Though community organizations perform many different tasks (e.g., service, advocacy, political) (Marwell 2004), we maintain that a core and distinctive function is to represent communities primarily in local planning and policy arenas (Davidoff 1965; Arnstein 1969; Warren 2001; Levine 2021). Though community organizations play this representational function in rich and poor neighborhoods alike, it is particularly acute in low-income communities of color.

At a general level, low-income communities of color face important resource deficits and stigma, challenging their abilities to represent themselves directly in planning and policy arenas (Wacquant 2007). This can encourage such communities to “delegate” representation to people and organizations with more resources and status in planning and policy arenas (Bourdieu 1994). For instance, in his study of community organizations in south Texas, Warren (2001) showed that low-income Latino and Black communities were heavily stigmatized and mostly lacked planning knowledge, technical language, and skills needed to engage in policy battles. Because community organizations possessed these resources, marginalized communities delegated their voice to these organizations, which then represented community values and interests in policy and planning meetings.

Additionally, the changing structure and nature of the neoliberal state has elevated the representational functions of community organizations in low-income communities of color (McQuarrie and Marwell 2009; Levine 2021). Levine (2021) shows that the roll back of the public sector in low-income neighborhoods weakened the abilities of elected officials to use the delivery of public goods and jobs (e.g., clientelism, machine politics) to bolster their prestige and power in these neighborhoods. As elected officials shifted their attention to city-level politics and away from neighborhood level machines, community organizations assumed a more important role as representatives of community interests, with funders and elected officials turning to them to express community interests, mediate conflicts, and provide support for projects. Organizations grew more dependent on philanthropist and government funding, but their role as community representatives was also elevated. Thus, for low-income communities of color, long term resource deficits (material and symbolic) and changes to urban politics (declining importance neighborhood political machines) have combined to elevate the representational functions of community organizations.

In sum, community organizations are diverse in terms of activities and forms (e.g., semi-formal associations, nonprofit organizations, community development corporations), but a core function, especially in marginalized communities, is representational. This definitive function provides organizations with a common resource pool, discourses, practices, and rules of engagement, which in turn structures their relations to one another and to those outside the field. Organizations that cede their representational function entirely (e.g., full time service providers) remain organizations but move beyond the boundaries of the field of community organizing and into another field made up of organizations performing similar functions.

Vertical relations: Dependence on patrons and communities

Community organizations rely on various resources, but two resources are crucial for fulfilling representative functions: community legitimacy and money. Community organizations do not generate these resources on their own. They derive them from their relations to sources of support from below and above: the communities they represent, on the one hand, and patrons (e.g., government, philanthropies, banks, etc.), on the other.

For communities to delegate their voice to organizations, community members must view the organizations as legitimate representatives of their interests and values. Organizations accrue legitimacy by expressing belonging to the community and autonomy from external pressures (e.g., government officials, banks, philanthropies, etc.). Organizations that are perceived as legitimate can attract more community supporters and constituents. For instance, in a case study of community organizing in Chicago, Pattillo-McCoy (1998) shows how one community organization accrued enormous levels of legitimacy within the community. This legitimacy allowed the organization to mobilize community members in a variety of campaigns and assume a central representative role in city politics. Key to this legitimacy was the organization’s abilities to draw on a common cultural repertoire which consisted of “‘beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories and rituals of daily life’” (Pattillo-McCoy 1998: 768-769). Moreover, government officials and philanthropists turn to community organizations precisely because they appear to be legitimate representatives in the neighborhoods they serve (Levine 2021). Organizational leaders may speak at community events on behalf of their projects, employ the language of their patrons to frame the project, and perform outreach. Their abilities to cultivate consent within a community rest on their legitimacy within communities. Without legitimacy, organizations have greater difficulty winning the trust of residents and presenting themselves as voices of the community to their patrons.

Representing a community also requires money to hire employees skilled in organizing, politics, and the technical aspects of urban planning and policy. Money provides organizations with office space, equipment, and disposable income for mounting projects. Organizations that lack financial resources struggle to survive, let alone mount sophisticated campaigns to elevate the voice of their constituents. For instance, Reardon and his colleagues observe that Black community organizations in St. Louis lacked the financial resources needed to engage in urban planning. They recount that “they [the organizations] had no capacity to generate these plans and to generate political organization to press for their enactment” (Reardon, et. al. 1993). To obtain sufficient financial resources, community organizations often turn to external resources like philanthropic foundations, city grants and contracts, and financial institutions (Domhoff 2005; Arena 2012; McQuarrie 2013; Kohl-Arenas 2016). For instances, Dreier notes that banks have, “forged partnerships with CDCs, providing them not only with credit to undertake a variety of housing and economic development projects, but also with philanthropic grants to underwrite their organizational operating expenses” (2003: 197).

The accumulation of these two essential resources – community legitimacy and money – requires the cultivation of relations with groups that may have conflicting interests, aims, norms, and agendas. Relational dependency on conflicting groups places organizations in a contradictory position because accumulation of one resource can undercut the accumulation of the other. On the one hand, community organizations can generate legitimacy by demonstrating their unconflicted commitment to the community and autonomy nefarious outsiders. However, asserting too much autonomy from outside patrons come at the risk of financial penury. Such organizations will likely struggle to pay their bills, let alone launch robust campaigns to represent the interests and grievances of the communities they serve. On the other hand, organizations that swing too far in the other direction and become heavily dependent on external funders can undermine their own legitimacy within their communities. Community members may view them as conflicted at best and selling out the community at worst. Declining legitimacy can lead to declining support among community members, which can in turn undermine an organization’s abilities to exercise power in planning and policy arenas. There is therefore a structural contradiction at the heart of the field of community organizing. Moving too far in one direction (dependency on outside funders) or the other (complete autonomy) introduces risks and dilemmas, precipitating organizations to recalibrate responses as they seek to survive and thrive within the field. The effects of relational contradictions are not immediately felt. They are latent risks that become manifest under certain conditions, such as inter-organizational competition.

Horizontal relations: Competition from other community organizations

Inter-organizational competition for scarce resources transforms contradictory positioning into a dilemma-filled reality. Increased competition for resources (whether legitimacy or money) renders resources scarcer, which increases the power of resource holders (whether community or patrons) to ensure compliance with their expectations and demands (McCarthy and Zald 1977; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Vermeulen 2013). The sources controlling resources enjoy enhanced power to make demands and enforce compliance on dependents. Community organizations deviating from expectations can be substituted by another community organization that is more willing to comply. Thus, the more organizations compete for resources from a limited number of sources (patrons and communities), the more compelled organizations are to comply with their expectations.

Inter-organizational competition also enforces accountability by other competing organizations. Community organizations compete with one another for similar grants or a particular community’s support and legitimacy. Organizations often elevate their own strengths by directly or obliquely denigrating rivals. For organizations working closely with external funders, rival organizations may question their legitimacy to the communities they represent, suggesting that they have a conflict of interest (“sell out”, “poverty pimps”, “establishment”). For more insurgent community organizations, competitors may seek to shut them out of funding sources because of their lack of professionalism. In these instances, competition serves as a disciplining mechanism and compels organizations to hold each other accountable to the expectations of patrons or communities.

Inter-organizational competition therefore favors the power of groups that control scarce resources. In organizational fields where one set of actors exert control over the distribution of resources, enhanced power of resource holders results in greater organizational conformity with the rules of the game (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). However, in a field where there are conflicting groups holding and distributing strategic resources, inter-organizational competition is more likely to pull organizations in conflicting directions, exacerbating contradictions and intractable trade-offs.

In sum, we maintain that the concept of field makes an important contribution to the literature on community organizations in planning and policy because it provides guidance into the contradictory relations shaping community organizations. Organizations are positioned vertically between patrons that provide financial support and community constituents that provide legitimacy. They are also positioned horizontally between other community organizations competing for the same scare resources from the same sources of support. Positioned in this way, community organizations face competing expectations and pressures from different relational exchanges. The concept of field specifies the distinctive yet conflicting pressures associated with types of relations (e.g., benefactors, communities, other community organizations). The enhanced ability to specify pressures associated with different relations allows us to better explain for the contradictions facing all organizations and differentiate organizational responses. In this way, the concept of organizational field allows planning theory to better explain for organizational dilemmas and practices rather than merely describe them.

Differentiating practices within the field

All organizations within the field of community organizing experience contradictions, but they do not experience them in the same ways. Organizations are embedded in different types of relations, which generate their own distinctive sets of contradictory pressures on organizations. Strategies, tactics, and practices responding to these contradictions, consequently, differ as well, resulting in a multiplicity of organizational practices. Some organizations may certainly adopt an insider-outsider strategy, but others may reject the strategy as “selling out”. Still, others may position themselves more on the inside than the outside while others struggle to find a balance between the two. The purpose here is not to document and describe all possible practices, strategies, and tactics, but to simply identify the conditions that give rise to this multiplicity.

We present a spectrum of ideal typical relations and suggest that practices can vary accordingly. Some community organizations are more tightly aligned with patrons, others are more tightly aligned with communities, and still others occupy a middle position between the two. Inter-organizational competition further complicates and intensifies the contradictions associated with these three relational types. Thus, rather than suggest that complex yet opaque relations result in generic practices (e.g., hybrid, code-switching, inside-outside), we suggest that distinctive combinations of relations (e.g., patrons, community constituents, other community organizations) generate distinctive contradictory pressures, which in turn differentiate organizational practices.

Embracing public and private patrons

On one side of the spectrum, there are organizations that prioritize their relations with public and private patrons for the purposes of maximizing funding and ensuring organizational growth. In Miraftab’s terms, they are more committed to engaging the “invited spaces” of government more than creating the “invented spaces” of insurgency (Miraftab 2009).

There has been a sharp increase in funding for community organizations in low-income communities (Marwell 2004; Domhoff 2005; Kohl-Arenas 2016) over past half century. Funders – city governments, philanthropists, banks, developers – turn to community organizations for the purposes of providing services to low-income communities and cultivating consent for development projects and the general system (Arena 2012). For community organizations, more funding from diverse sources allows them to increase and diversify revenue streams. Community organizations receiving these financial resources are expected to perform a variety of functions in return. These include the delivery of services and public goods at a lower cost than the government; serving as an intermediary between government agencies, developers, and low-income communities; organizing participatory community events; advocating for specific development and planning projects; and supporting the norms and language of their public and private patrons.

Maintaining good relations with public and private funders create avenues to obtain financial resources, but these organizations still require community legitimacy. Too much financial dependency on external funders can be used by competitors to undercut their reputation and legitimacy in the communities they serve. Competitors can suggest that an organization is supported by “outsiders” or has “sold out” the community. When an organization’s legitimacy declines, residents cease believing and trusting the organization, which makes it more difficult for the organization to gain the support of residents. Moreover, when organizations lose the trust of their communities, community members cease believing them in planning and policy matters. Unable to cultivate consent, funders may shift grants to more capable, effective, and representative organizations.

To stave off threats to their legitimacy, organizations positioned on this side of the spectrum engage in what we call “legitimation work”. Such work consists of stressing community belonging and undermining the legitimacy of rivals. Culture also plays an important role in legitimation work. Organizations may employ their common cultural repertoire (e.g., art, colloquial terms, clothing, dispositions, narratives) to signal belonging and commitment to the community (Pattillo-McCoy 1998). The greater the struggle over legitimacy, the more embattled organizations employ symbols to assert community belonging. Additionally, legitimation work includes undercutting the legitimacy of rival organizations. Common tactics include deriding rivals as too radical or as outsider interlopers. For instance, in the case of Detroit, a dominant CDC sought to undermine the legitimacy of a rival community organization by accusing it of having been infiltrated by out-of-town White activists with no standing in Detroit’s Black neighborhoods (Laskey and Nicholls 2019). In a very similar fashion, well-established Chicano community organizations in East Los Angeles accused an insurgent anti-gentrification organization of consisting of White adventurers. Thus, organizations can offset challenges to their legitimacy by bolstering belonging and undercutting the legitimacy of rivals. Even when organizations are well-established, generate important revenue, and have strong connections to foundations and public funders, their dominant position can still be unsettled – especially in a crowded organizational field – by rivals who question their autonomy and commitment to the community. This compels even the most established and well-off community organizations to engage in legitimation work.

Embracing community autonomy

On the other side of the spectrum are organizations that guard their autonomy and seek to maximize community legitimacy. These organizations are committed to expressing the autonomous voice of the community through contentious struggles against city officials, developers, and collaborating community organizations (Beard 2003; Miraftab 2009; Friedmann 2011). They are committed to creating “invented space” and rejecting “invited spaces” (Miraftab 2009).

These organizations may adopt transgressive words and deeds. They often use radical discourse to criticize urban development and planning. They may diagnose the problem of development as racialized capitalist displacement and pin the blame on racial capitalists, government officials, and gentrifiers. They may also propose radical solutions like abolishing rent and large-scale decommodification of urban land. In addition to radical language, insurgents employ disruptive political tactics like rent strikes, occupations, and other forms of civil disobedience (Piven and Cloward 1979). For instance, an insurgent community organization in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles aggressively protested art galleries, coffee shops, and other purveyors of gentrification in the neighborhood (Huante 2021; Sarmiento 2021; co-author, forthcoming). These protests were covered by local and national media alike, raising questions and debate about the gentrification of the city’s historically Latino working communities. These types of tactics are, as Scott would say, the “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985); costing little financially but generating enormous uncertainty and risk for investors and city officials (Sarmiento 2021). Despite the efficacy of such tactics, they require committed activists to risk their freedom, money, and psychological and personal well-being.

Insurgents maximize community legitimacy by stressing their independence from government officials, developers, banks, and all agents of capitalist urban development. When organizations are seen as autonomous and representing the true interests of the community, they are sometimes better able to recruit more activists willing to take large risks in the pursuit of their goals. In the early days of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton recruited a small number of members into the incipient organization. They accrued community legitimacy by embracing the concept of “self-defense”. This was reflected in the name of the organization, their party platform (“We want power to determine the destiny of our Black community”), community policing by members of the Party, and the adoption of a “Survival Program” that consisted of a variety of community-managed services. The Party’s growing legitimacy in Oakland enabled it to recruit more committed members, activists, and supporters, transforming it into one of most potent insurgent community organizations in the past half century (Bloom and Martin 2016).

Accruing community legitimacy can be competitive and contentious, especially in a crowded organizational field. For instance, the Black Panther Party engaged in contests of varying intensity with the mainstream leadership of the civil rights movement and African nationalist organizations such as US Organization (Bloom and Martin 2016). These organizations were all vying to be recognized as the true representatives of the Black community. In their competition, they criticized one another (explicitly and implicitly) for failing to reflect the community’s “true” interests. Regarding US Organization, competition for community legitimacy was so fierce that its director, Ron Karenga, became an informant for a FBI counterintelligence program (Bloom and Martin 2016). Insurgent community organizations therefore bolster their legitimacy by asserting autonomy and commitments to the community, criticizing rivals (“sell outs”, “poverty pimps”, “carpetbaggers”, “outsiders”, “interlopers”, etc.), and defending themselves against attacks. The more crowded the organizational field, the sharper the competition.

Insurgents place great value on community legitimacy, but this can invite financial marginalization. Most funders – private and public – are reluctant to fund insurgents because of their radical positions, disruptive tactics, and transformative goal (Piven and Cloward 1979). The inability to raise financial capital makes it difficult for insurgent organizations to obtain and sustain critical material resources (e.g., paid staff, office space, equipment). With limited or no staff, these organizations may overload limited staff volunteers with responsibilities, resulting in high rates of burnout and turnover. Consequently, insurgent organizations have a much higher mortality rate than better financed community organizations (Zald and McCarthy 1987; Walker and McCarthy 2010). Those that do survive may struggle to sustain long-term mobilization capacities and establish themselves as a potent political force, running the risk of being pushed to the margins of the field. Organizations like the Black Panther Party are exceptions because extremely high levels of community legitimacy allowed them to mobilize resources from the community, which offset financial losses. The exceptional case of the Black Panthers Party reinforces a general rule that community legitimacy via radical autonomy can set insurgent organizations on a path of financial precarity.

Thus, organizations responding in this way do not automatically accrue community legitimacy. They are pitted against other organizations committed to maintaining their own legitimacy and do so by undercutting rivals. In crowded and competitive fields, this propels these types of organizations into a constant battle over who is the truly legitimate representative of the community. Financial precarity combines with perpetual conflict to increase the likelihood of organizational fragmentation (at best) or demise (at worst).

Middling Position: Between Patrons and Community and Between Competing Organizations Many organizations occupy a position in the middle of the spectrum. They struggle to strike a balance between top-down (public and private funders) and bottom-up (community legitimacy) resources and the polarized organizations competing with one another for power and positioning within the field. Pulled between these competing poles, these organizations are in an insecure and unpredictable middle position (Stoecker 1997). For instance, in a study on an immigrant community organization in Pasadena, California, Nicholls (2020) showed that the organization was fully committed to defending the rights of low-income Latino day laborers, but it also depended heavily on CDBG funds from the city. Elected officials became frustrated with immigrant day laborers and used public funding to compel the organization to exert disciplinary control over the workers. The organization was, consequently, between the need to satisfy its funders and the need to maintain its legitimacy in Pasadena’s immigrant community. Proclaiming autonomy from the city would eliminate an important source of funding while working at the behest of the city would completely undermine the organization’s legitimacy as a defender of the immigrant community. This situation lasted for several years until the immigrant organization successfully pushed back with the threat of a lawsuit.

Middling organizations must work and ally with more powerful community organizations in the field while also seeking to limit conflict with insurgents on their more radical flank. On the one hand, close ties between external funders and more powerful organizations allow the latter to influence how funding is distributed in their fields. Moreover, donors sometimes provide dominant organizations with financial resources to distribute grants to smaller community organization (i.e., regranting) (Domhoff 2005; Nicholls 2019). Consequently, middling organizations are encouraged to cultivate alliances with dominant organizations and even participate on their campaigns. For instance, the local affiliate of the Center for Community Change in New York assumed regranting functions for the Ford Foundation. This allowed it to exercise enormous influence over the distribution of grants to community organizations in its region (Domhoff 2005). In such a context, middling New York organizations were compelled to develop good relations with the Center for Community Change. On the other hand, middling organizations must remain attentive to the insurgent organizations positioned on their more radical flank. Middling organizations do not want to be called out or criticized because maintaining legitimacy is important for maintaining support in the community.

More than other organizations, middling organizations contend with the full brunt of the field’s contradictions in all aspect of their work. Each political act, public statement, grant application, and hire strikes a balancing between these competing forces, with one wrong move in either direction risking the loss of money or community legitimacy. Structurally placed on a knife’s edge, the middling position becomes inscribed in the conscious choices and unconscious dispositions of these organizations. They embody the middle in language, practice, and habit.

Conclusion

Urban scholars have spent considerable time examining the role that community organizations play in planning and policy arenas. Much of this literature has diverged along two lines; one that emphasizes structural constraints and the other that emphasizes the conditions for participation, advocacy, and communication. Both sides of this debate make important observations. Structural constraints are real, but so too are advocacy and community representation. Though both aspects of community organizing are at play, the dichotomous framing of organizational engagement limits our ability to understand the contradictions that structure and shape every aspect of organizations. Recognizing this limitation, a group of scholars has drawn attention to the complex relations facing community organizations (Elwood 2006; DeFilippis et. al, 2006, 2007, 2010; Trudeau 2008a, 2008b, 2009). This strand is important because it provides a path out of the structure-agency dichotomy that has long stifled the literature. However, these scholars assert that complex relations matter but do not specify how. We do not know what these relations consist of, how they exert pressures on organizations, and how such pressures give rise to differentiated contradictions and organizational practices.

The intent of this paper has been to build on this strand of literature by employing the concept of organizational field. The concept is useful because it focuses on relations and their distinctive pressures on organizations rather than focusing primarily on the repsonses of individual organizations. From this perspective, we suggest that community organizations compete with one another for the essential resources (money and community legitimacy) needed to achieve core representative functions. Resources conflict with each other because they come from sources with conflicting expectations. Money mostly comes from external funders (e.g., public grants, foundations, financial institutions) that expect grantees or beneficiaries to fulfill programmatic and political expectations. Funders also create a variety of ways to hold their benefactors accountable and can threaten funding cuts when they veer too far from expectations. By contrast, community legitimacy is derived from residents and other organizations operating in the community. These people deem an organization legitimate if it is perceived as representing community values and interests in an autonomous and effective way. High levels of legitimacy allow organizations to command the support of many residents, which in turn enables organizations to exercise greater influence in planning and policy arenas.

Following from this, we maintain those conflicting relations generate contradictions, but contradictions are experienced differently - in terms of dilemmas, priorities, pressures, options – depending on the particular configuration of relations. Moving too far in one direction (e.g., cultivating community legitimacy) places resources sourced from the other end (e.g., money from funders) at risk, compelling organizations to compensate for resource losses through various tactical maneuverings. Too much dependency on money from external sources places organizations at risk of losing community legitimacy, especially in crowded organizational fields. Rival organizations and aggrieved residents can criticize and call out overly dependent organizations for selling out the community. Call outs and criticisms have become more threatening with the advent of social media. When faced with criticism and the potential loss of legitimacy, accused organizations must fortify their left flank by engaging in legitimacy work. Using various symbolic tools, they perform and signal their belonging to the community while also deriding the legitimacy of their rivals. On the other side of the spectrum are organizations that eschew external funding and maximize community legitimacy. Though these organizations have greater political autonomy to represent community values and interests, they lack the money to invest in skilled and experienced staff, office space and equipment, and sustained and multifrontal campaigns. In other words, they have autonomy and legitimacy to represent, but lack the organizational infrastructure needed to achieve community representation over an extended period. They can compensate for the financial loss by raising their own money or through exceptional amounts of voluntary labor, but such compensatory efforts rarely suffice.

Some organizations may certainly position themselves on opposed sides of the relational spectrum, but we suggest that most find themselves in the middle of the field, struggling with the trade-offs of moving too far in one direction or the other. They realize that moving too close to external sources can undercut community legitimacy and support. They also know that striving for complete community autonomy undercuts their abilities to acquire financial resources needed to maintain their organizations and mount campaigns. These middling organizations do not operate in isolation but are embedded in dense organizational networks that stretch across the field. Through these interactions, they are tugged in different directions, constantly weighing the cost and benefits of aligning with certain groups over others and taking certain positions over others.

Our framework of the field of community organizing is intended not to serve as an empirical description of actual organizational dynamics and practices. Instead, it is a theoretical framework that allows us to better understand the relations that structure the practical worlds of organizations and the mechanisms that shape organizational choices, tactics, and practices. The concept of organizational field allows us to elevate the relations, contradictions, and dilemmas facing organizations and assess the countless conflicted maneuverings they pursue to achieve representational functions. Because relations within this field are contradictory, they are also highly dynamic, making every choice vulnerable to challenges from inside and outside an organization. Organizational responses (e.g., hybrid, code switching, insider-outsider strategy) are therefore not synthetic resolutions of antagonistic relations. They are temporary fixes that can be called into question when pressures mount and contexts change. Community organizations are therefore collectivities of human beings and most seek to achieve good. But they operate in fields that demand countless compromises, some more desirable than others. Though responses are generally conflicted and often muddled, they are nevertheless necessary for advancing the interests and values of the communities they represent

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Walter Julio Nicholls

Author biographies

Walter Julio Nicholls is Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine. His research asseesses how cities incubate the activism of marginalized groups. He has written extensively on immigrant rights activism and local immigration policies in the United States and Europe.

Ashley Camille Hernandez is an Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research centers on urban political economy and community development. She is particularly interested in theories and practices of urban social movements for social justice and equitable cities.

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