Rethinking Organizations: The Relationship Between Individuals, Venues, and the Communities They Share

• In Event: 2451 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 13. Organizations at the micro/meso/macro interface

Abstract

Local voluntary organizations compete with each other for scarce resources, in particular the time and resources of potential volunteers. One approach to studying these competitive relationships employs large scale, low spatial resolution data to characterize the demographic niches organizations inhabit vis-a-vis their members. The current study deepens our understanding of these competitive relationships by asking how venues--discrete physical spaces with an ostensible purpose and norms for achieving this purpose--affect participation in religious congregations, a type of local voluntary organization with both a distinct organizational niche and long history of catalyzing secular social activities. Synthesizing novel data from a nationally representative study of congregations and their worshipers with administrative data on local residents and businesses in their communities, I characterize how these voluntary organizations (and their members) respond to venue scarcity within the local community. Specifically, this papers (1) demonstrate the relationship between individuals, organizations, and venues, and (2) test the generalizability of resource dynamics associated with the Black Church to other contexts exhibiting similar (though categorically less strict) constraints. Logistic regression and generalized structural equation modeling suggests that economic hardship plays a significant role mediating the relationship between the presence of secular venues and organizations and congregations’ programming decisions, as well as the impact of this relationship on individuals’ valuing of organizations and level of civic engagement.

Author

• Christopher Michael Graziul, University of Chicago