Power in Collaboration: Varied Institutional Logics of the State at Two Los Angeles Senior Centers

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 13: Urban Services

Abstract

Services for older adults are not uniform across the board. Scholars in the street-level bureaucracy tradition explain the differences in service provision through the individual distinctions in providers’ personal backgrounds or the service recipients’ socioeconomic status. More macro-level approaches posit that variance between organizations could be explained by different sectors and funding sources that support these services. This paper traces two senior centers in Los Angeles — one nonprofit, the other public. There was more heterogeneity between these centers rather than within them, which de-emphasized individual characteristics of service providers. Serving similar populations, the recipients' demographics did not sufficiently explain the variation. Last, despite their sectoral differences, both organizations were primarily funded by the state.
Thus, this paper focuses on intra-sectoral variation in city bureaucracies that organize these senior centers — Department of Aging and Department of Recreation and Parks. Based on the data generated from 9 consecutive months of participant observation and 34 in-depth interviews with service providers and city/county administrators in Los Angeles, I typologize the services at these organizations as care and control, empowerment and inattention. These different types of services — positive or negative, provider- or recipient-centric — depended on the location of power (who has it) and the nature of power (productive or repressive). If the location of power was framed by the professional or recreational institutional logics of different governmental branches that oversaw these services; the nature of power relied on service providers and recipients working together. Thus, I reckon with the organizational influence in service provision, in conversation with the micro- and macro- assessments of older adult services documented by other scholars.

Author

• Dasom Nah Gonzalez, University of California-Los Angeles