Neighborhood Organizations

Research and scholarship on the subject of neighborhood organizations have not taken the concept either of neighborhood or of neighborhood organization for granted. Although both terms have a provenance stretching back into the earliest days of the sociological tradition, they have come in for sustained interrogation over the last several decades. Therefore, a look into neighborhood organizations as they pertain to social networks begins with an examination of how the concept of neighborhood has evolved in the literature and various notions of neighborhood organization. A range of debates surround neighborhood organizations, most prominently the relationship with crime, poverty, and the determinants of participation and representation within voluntary neighborhood organizations.

The literature on neighborhood organizations testifies to a secular decline and gradual reinvigoration of interest in the neighborhood as a locus of effective and viable social organization. While the earliest documenters of neighborhood functioning believed that neighborhoods were a natural cradle for strong social ties, recent scholars share the skepticism of 1960s and 1970s researchers with regard to the “natural community” hypothesis of urban neighborhoods. Instead, current research is more liable to be interested in the determinants of effective neighborhood organizations, particularly race and poverty and how they affect levels of participation and representation within such organizations. Neighborhood organizations are also understood in a variety of ways, including state-sponsored, nonprofit, and for-profit service providers as well as neighborhood-based voluntary organizations.

Definitional issues have assumed centrality, because in research on neighborhood organizations, the descriptive and the prescriptive have from the beginning been closely intertwined. Much research has been driven by crucial policy questions about how and where [Page 581]to intervene in the urban arena to provide services and public goods to citizens. The spatial correlates of social networks in urban areas are key to understanding and answering these questions.