Dealing with Disorder? Malign Neglect and the Relational Work of City Workers

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 7. Culture Section Network: Material Culture

Abstract

This study advances the notion of malign neglect to help explain decisions of city officials who regulate the kind of dilapidated and dangerous built environments – such as broken windows and abandoned buildings – that feature in studies of disorder. Urban sociologists consistently show that people perceive physical disorder as more problematic in minority and low-income neighborhoods. While new studies of materiality suggest that material attributes matter as much as neighborhood context. Drawing on fieldwork with building inspectors in Chicago, however, I show that building inspectors do not see the city through the lens of disorder and that material attributes are not as important for inspectors as their inferences about how material conditions were produced. Inspectors are focused neither just on the material conditions nor the neighborhood context of those conditions. Rather, these government actors assess the relationship between material conditions and their production when deciding which buildings and property owners deserve leniency when they inspect them for building code violations. Moving from disorder to the concept of malign neglect borrows from and builds on relational sociology. Demonstrating that material conditions are less of a set of physical features than a relational construct, malign neglect offers a resolution to a core issue with the relational approach.

Author

• Robin Bartram, Tulane University