Bargaining for Brooklyn

Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City

Cloth $60.00 ISBN: 9780226509068 Published December 2007

Paper $25.00 ISBN: 9780226509075 Published December 2007

E-book $7.00 to $25.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226509082 Published May 2009

When middle-class residents fled American cities in the 1960s and 1970s, government services and investment capital left too. Countless urban neighborhoods thus entered phases of precipitous decline, prompting the creation of community-based organizations that sought to bring direly needed resources back to the inner city. Today there are tens of thousands of these CBOs—private nonprofit groups that work diligently within tight budgets to give assistance and opportunity to our most vulnerable citizens by providing services such as housing, child care, and legal aid.

Through ethnographic fieldwork at eight CBOs in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick, Nicole P. Marwell discovered that the complex and contentious relationships these groups form with larger economic and political institutions outside the neighborhood have a huge and unexamined impact on the lives of the poor. Most studies of urban poverty focus on individuals or families, but Bargaining for Brooklyn widens the lens, examining the organizations whose actions and decisions collectively drive urban life.

Review Quotes
Contents

“Overflowing with new ideas, Bargaining for Brooklyn is a valuable work that will influence the way sociologists understand the cycle of development of poor, urban neighborhoods. Marwell makes a unique contribution with an analytic strategy that emphasizes the important role played by community based organizations, actors that have been generally ignored in urban sociology.”—Mitchell Duneier, Princeton University and CUNY Graduate Center

“With Bargaining for Brooklyn, Marwell brings ethnography firmly into the New York landscape, and she establishes herself as the leading contemporary sociological voice on the city. Her analytic gifts are evident in the intricate weave of organizational theory, political sociology, and qualitative research protocols. Her deep penetration into the dynamics of community development in one borough sheds new light on the complicated ways in which collectives—organizations, ethnic groups, government agencies—shape the social outcomes of individuals. Bargaining for Brooklyn is sure to be a classic.”—Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Columbia University, author of Off the Books

“In Bargaining for Brooklyn, Nicole Marwell brings a fresh perspective to bear on the perennial problem of urban poverty. Rather than looking to interpersonal relationships within geographic communities for insights, Marwell focuses on community development organizations and their role in negotiating the larger social order of the city. Her emphasis on organizational fields is backed by a rich ethnographic analysis, making for an original contribution to rethinking community development policies for the urban poor.”—Robert J. Sampson, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University

"A significant addition to the literature on urban policy and community development."

"Marwell's ethnography is truly exceptional in illustrating the byzantine institutional setting that must be navigatied before CBOs can connect neighborhood residents to the resources they need. . . . Bargaining for Brooklyn has much to offer, not just to ethnographers of urban poverty and community studies, but to urban, political, and organizations sociology broadly. The writing is accessible, and the cases are compelling. . . . Not only will the book be widely read and assigned, it should be a central text on urban poverty, interscalar institutional analysis, and CBOs. More generally, Marwell's voice is a welcome addition to an already illustrious cast of contemporary urban ethnographers."

"Marwell provides an excellent community history of Puerto Ricans and Latinos in Brooklyn. . . . [The book] is richly detailed and likely to serve as a wonderful resource for future research."

Contents

List of illustrations

1. Formal Organizations and the Problem of Social Order in the City
2. A Place to Live
3. A Voice in Politics
4. A Path to Work
5. Organizations and Participation
6. Conclusion

Acknowledgements
Appendix. Notes on Research Design and Method
Works Cited
Index

For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu

Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology

Political Science: Race and Politics | Urban Politics

Sociology: Race, Ethnic, and Minority Relations | Social Change, Social Movements, Political Sociology | Urban and Rural Sociology

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