Nicole P. Marwell is Associate Professor of Sociology and Latina/o Studies at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2000, and is a faculty affiliate of Columbia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Center for Urban Research and Policy, Center on Organizational Innovation, and Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Marwell is also a member of the Editorial Board of the American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology, and directs the Workshop on Nonprofit Organizations in Economy and Society at Columbia.

Research Profile

My research sits at the intersection of three subfields in sociology – urban sociology, organizational sociology, and political sociology – with a substantive focus on nonprofit organizations, local and state politics, and Latina/o communities. My work is primarily oriented towards the classic questions of urban sociology, but I approach them in empirical settings and via theoretical lenses rooted in organizational and political sociology. The development of this hybrid approach derives from my sense of the current lack of coherence, both empirically and theoretically, within urban sociology. Virtually any social phenomenon that can be found in cities is now considered part of urban sociology. Although the original American urban sociologists, Robert Park and some of his Chicago School colleagues, also ranged widely in their empirical investigations, their work was united in its pursuit of some key themes: how the city maintained social order in the context of rapid social change; how the city’s heterogeneous populations sorted into enduring patterns of social stratification; and how land use affected the possibilities for social interaction and mobility. My work engages all of these enduring questions about the city by emphasizing their present-day embeddedness in meso-level structures of action: formal organizations and political architectures. I use primarily qualitative research methods to examine how urban organizations, institutions, and politics shape and transform the conditions in which individuals and groups find themselves, circumscribing their agency in ways that both enable and constrain.

Recent Publications

Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City.  (2007, University of Chicago Press).
This book uses data from three years of participant-observation in eight nonprofit community-based organizations in Brooklyn, New York, to re-examine the classic urban sociological question of how to establish social integration and social order in the contemporary city. In the last two decades, urban sociologists have attempted to understand challenges to integration and order, such as poverty and crime, primarily by focusing on the social structures of family and neighborhood. In this book, I open up a wider lens on the social processes underlying poverty, opportunity, and inequality to consider how elements of social structure that reach beyond interpersonal ties contribute to poverty and its related social problems. I examine how formal organizations working towards a variety of economic and political ends make decisions that collectively produce the conditions that poor people face in everyday life, and under whose constraints the poor make daily choices. I use nonprofit community-based organizations as windows onto these contentious economic and political organizational systems, which I refer to as "fields," and explore the operation of three distinct fields whose outcomes matter profoundly for the poor: housing production, public services spending, and paid work. In agreements struck among the organizations that compose a field, various outcomes are produced that set the bounds on what kinds of organizational and individual action are possible. Because field-level outcomes are the collective product of inter-organizational agreements, new outcomes can be produced when inter-organizational agreements change. Although the interactions that occur in families and neighborhoods are crucial for communicating the kinds of individual behaviors prohibited, accepted, and rewarded in society, the social contexts within which poor people make their everyday behavioral decisions are in fact much bigger than these networks of interpersonal interaction suggest. My research shows how neighborhood organizations can mediate and sometimes change how the workings of economic and political fields impact the poor – impacts that are arguably as important as the family and neighborhood relationships on which studies of the poor often focus.

"The Non-Profit/For-Profit Continuum: Theorizing the Dynamics of Mixed-Form Markets" (with Paul-Brian McInerney, 2005, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly).
This paper presents a theory of the dynamic relationship between nonprofit and for-profit firms in the creation, expansion, and transformation of service markets. The approach challenges the traditional notion of fixed boundaries between these two sectors. After laying out the components of our theory, we use data from two longitudinal, qualitative studies to analyze the unique contributions and capacities of the nonprofit and for-profit organizational forms in the development of service markets, and to examine the transformation of market structure over time. In 2005, at the annual conference of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, the section on Theories, Issues, and Boundaries hosted a panel discussion of this paper as part of its plenary program.

"Privatizing the Welfare State: Nonprofit Community-Based Organizations as Political Actors" (2004, American Sociological Review).
In this paper, I show how the privatization of welfare-state services in a context of federal devolution of spending decisions to states and municipalities produces the structural conditions for nonprofit community organizations to reprise the role of the old-style urban political machine. In a particular form of entrepreneurialism, some of these groups organize voters and other kinds of political performance in order to secure large quantities of public resources, which they then distribute to loyal local residents in the form of services and jobs. The paper offers one of the few contemporary discussions of the conditions found in poor urban neighborhoods from a perspective that emphasizes the roles of formal organizations and politics, as opposed to a focus on micro-level social interaction. The paper won the 2005 Robert Park Award for best scholarly article from the Community and Urban Section of the American Sociological Association.

Current Projects

"Making It" Isn’t Enough: U.S. Latinos and Middle-Class Fragility

In the context of today’s highly charged immigration debate, when the dominant image of Latinos in the United States is that they are a poor and foreign people, the very idea of a Latino middle class provokes ambiguity and contradiction. Who, many Americans might ask, would fall into such a category? While this question might seem to call for a straightforward empirical accounting, in fact much more is at stake. Middle class status is fundamental to a sense of belonging in the U.S. As such, to talk about a "Latino middle class" is to lay claim for this group to the quintessential American identity. This book project pursues two interconnected tasks through an examination of the Latino middle class. The first involves painting a general profile of this group: Who comprises it? What are its characteristics? How has it changed over time? What are some of its specificities in different parts of the country? The second is to consider how the experiences of the Latino middle class might be illuminating of the contemporary condition of the American middle class as a whole. In this endeavor, I draw on qualitative life-history interviews with 100 Latino young adults, ages 25 to 35, who grew up in middle-class families in New York City. I compare the trajectories of those who have stayed on the path of their parents’ middle-class status (50 respondents), with those who are finding it difficult to do as well for themselves as their parents did (50 respondents). In a social, economic, and political climate quite unlike the nation’s post-Second World War golden age, can Latinos both hold their place in the middle class, and expand upon it? If not, does this group serve as the proverbial "canary in the coal mine" for all of us? That is, in the context of a declining welfare state, growing labor market inequality, and the retreat of employer-based assistance such as health care and pensions, will the vulnerabilities of the less-secure Latino middle class soon spread to the nation’s middle class as a whole?

The Spatial Allocation of Social Provision: Government Contracting, Material Resources, and Urban Poverty (with Co-PI Aaron O. Gullickson, University of Oregon)

This project draws together insights from the literatures on social provision and urban poverty to better understand the allocation and availability of an under-studied component of the U.S. welfare state: publicly-funded social provision services. Over the last thirty years, there has been a steep rise in U.S. federal, state, county, and municipal government purchasing of social provision services from nonprofit organizations. Competition among nonprofits for these government contracts creates winners and losers among places, organizations, and people. At present, however, we know very little about which places and organizations receive social provision contracts, and what factors affect this distribution. By examining these issues, this project will help us better understand how well or poorly citizens are being served by this growing component of the welfare state. Because nonprofits providing services do so in particular places, citizens are likely to access services for which they are eligible only when a provider is located nearby. This access issue is particularly important for our poorest citizens, who receive a small fraction of state income transfers, and for whom the direct services provided by NPOs can be as important to their well-being as cash. The project uses hierarchical linear models and GIS analysis to examine the distribution of New York State and New York City government contracts to nonprofit organizations in New York City, and to examine the relationship of contract allocations to neighborhood- and organization-level variables, including neighborhood socioeconomic need, organizational effectiveness, and neighborhood political strength. This project is supported by a grant from the Sociology program of the National Science Foundation.

Can There Be Theoretical Coherence in Urban Sociology?

This project is in a very early, developmental stage. Its central question concerns how to develop a productive dialogue between the two main – and highly disconnected – theoretical trajectories in urban sociology today: the Chicago School-inspired focus on neighborhood-level processes, including micro-interaction; and the political economy perspective whose main object of analysis lies at the macro- and institutional levels of urban change. I am developing this project with Michael McQuarrie, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California-Davis. An initial paper from this line of research is currently under journal review.

Workshop on Nonprofit Organizations in Economy and Society

I am the founder and director of the ISERP Workshop on Nonprofit Organizations in Economy and Society. The workshop was founded in the fall of 2002 to provide a forum to review research in progress about the role of nonprofit organizations in a variety of economic, social, and political processes. Although a three-sector model of the social world – as state, market, and nonprofit/third sector – offers a useful heuristic, the blurriness of these boundaries has become increasingly apparent as research on nonprofit organizations has proceeded. This workshop strives to understand how nonprofits are constitutive of dynamic relationships in play across traditional sectoral boundaries, and examines central issues in nonprofit research. The workshop meets six times per semester. Presenters include faculty members and graduate students from Columbia and other local universities. Once a semester, we host a special presentation by a distinguished scholar of nonprofit organizations from outside the New York area. The workshop offers sociology graduate students interested in these issues a uniquely productive environment in which to advance the theoretical and empirical quality of their research.

Teaching

I teach courses in both sociology and Latina/o Studies. In sociology, I teach the undergraduate lecture "Classical Social Theory," which is required for the major and concentration. I also teach a graduate seminar I developed for the department, entitled "Qualitative Research Methods: Interviews, Observations, and Documents." This course introduces students to five different qualitative research methods through a combination of reading about the principles of the methods, and completing exercises utilizing the methods. The final project for the course is an original research proposal. In Latina/o Studies, I teach the undergraduate lecture "Introduction to Latina/o Studies," which is required for the Latina/o Studies major and concentration, and satisfies the Core Curriculum’s Major Cultures requirement. I also teach an undergraduate seminar, "Latino Communities in New York City," in which 15 competitively selected students study existing work on seven different Latino neighborhoods, and conduct their own original ethnographic research projects. Two additional courses, for M.A. students in public affairs, are "Introduction to Public Affairs" and "Managing Public and Nonprofit Organizations."

Current CV