Leadership, Ideas, and Organizations: Rethinking the Intractability of Homelessness in America

• In Event: Poverty

Abstract

In America, the responsibility for doing something about homelessness, one of the nation’s most frustratingly durable manifestations of poverty and inequality, falls largely to thousands of nonprofit organizations. Prior work holds that nonprofits have not helped to reduce homelessness because their attention to the homeless population’s welfare has been usurped by a state-endorsed neoliberal project, which prioritizes managing and concealing homelessness over mitigating it. This article refocuses attention on the roles of top leaders at nonprofits, informed by recent work in organizational and cultural sociology showing that members of nonprofits’ leadership teams neither uncritically nor uniformly implement the state’s ideas. It situates its inquiry within an unsettled period of time, the first two years of the novel coronavirus pandemic, when we might have expected organizational culture to help leaders decide on new goals and develop new lines of action. Drawing on interviews with and documents authored by leaders of homelessness-oriented nonprofits, I link various ideas leaders expressed to three processes—minimization, eternalization, and deferral—that appear to have stymied transformation and progress. I consider implications for future work on homelessness, poverty, nonprofits, and organizational culture.

Author

• Joseph Wallerstein, Harvard University