Nonprofits for cohesive cities : neighborhood characteristics, organizational practices, and their effects on social and systemic integration

Abstract

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) contribute to vital neighborhoods by building communities of citizens and acting as intermediaries between citizens and organizations. We investigate how NPOs’ engagement in social and systemic integration is shaped by neighborhood characteristics, and how it relates to the organizational practices of managerialism and organizational democracy. We combine survey data with administrative data from a representative sample of NPOs in a major European city. To measure the effect of neighborhood on organizational integration, we separated the city into 7,840 grid cells characterized by population, per capita income, share of immigrant population, and density of organizations. Findings indicate that managerialism positively relates with systemic integration, as organizational democracy relates with social integration. Neighborhood characteristics, however, are not related with NPOs’ engagement in integration. Our findings contribute to research on urban social cohesion by illuminating the interplay between NPOs’ organizing practices, local neighborhoods, and contributions to both forms of integration.