Our Publications
The Civic Life of Cities Library
Over the years, CLC researchers have produced over 50 papers using data or ideas from the lab. Several of these works have won major awards.
We have also compiled these works into a publicly accessible library on Zotero and a BibText file (with PDFs where available).
2025
Han, Ling, and Xinning Gou. 2025. “Community Leadership in a Dynamic Perspective: An Exploratory Study of Community Foundations in Hong Kong During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Nonprofit Policy Forum: 1–21.
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Han, Ling, Chengpang Lee, and Qi Song. 2025. “From Crowdfunding to Crowd Mobilization: The Impact of Digital Philanthropy on Grassroots Organizations and Local Politics in China.” The China Quarterly 261(March):1–19.
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2024
Hohensinn, Lisa, Julia Litofcenko, Florentine Maier, and Leila Cornips. 2024. “Talking the Talk, or Walking the Walk? How Managerial Practices Relate to Nonprofit Organizations’ Role as Schools of Democracy.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 08997640241278634.
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Democracy and management: Organizational practices and nonprofits’ contributions to society
Terzieva, Berta, Christian Burkart, Florentine Maier, and Michael Meyer. 2024. “Democracy and Management: Organizational Practices and Nonprofits’ Contributions to Society.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 08997640241267861.
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Societal roles of nonprofit organizations: Parsonian echoes and Luhmannian reframing of the organization–society interface
Maier, Florentine, Michael Meyer, Christian Burkart, and Berta Terzieva. 2024. “Societal Roles of Nonprofit Organizations: Parsonian Echoes and Luhmannian Reframing of the Organization–Society Interface.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 08997640241241321.
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Organizations as drivers of social and systemic integration: Contradiction and reconciliation through loose demographic coupling and community anchoring
Laryea, Krystal, and Christof Brandtner. 2024. “Organizations as Drivers of Social and Systemic Integration: Contradiction and Reconciliation through Loose Demographic Coupling and Community Anchoring.” Pp. 177-200 in Sociological Thinking in Contemporary Organizational Scholarship Vol. 6, edited by S. Clegg, M. Grothe-Hammer, and K. S. Velarde. Emerald Publishing Limited.
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Han, Ling. 2024. “Crafting Gender into Meaningful Work: Experiences of Women Engaging in Social Entrepreneurship in China.” Gender in Management: An International Journal 39(7):997-1013.
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From iron cage to glass house: Repurposing of bureaucratic management and the turn to openness
Brandtner, Christof, Walter W. Powell, and Aaron Horvath. 2024. “From Iron Cage to Glass House: Repurposing of Bureaucratic Management and the Turn to Openness.” Organization Studies 45(2):193-221.
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Karner, Dominik, Michael Meyer, Lisa Schmidthuber, Daniel Semper, and Krystal Laryea. 2024. “Nonprofits for Cohesive Cities: Neighborhood Characteristics, Organizational Practices, and Their Effects on Social and Systemic Integration.” Voluntas 35(1):73-84.
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Terzieva, Berta, Florentine Maier, Michael Meyer, and Christian Burkart. 2024. “Cross-Sectional Organizational-Level Survey Data on Civil Society Organizations in the Metropolitan Region of Vienna, Austria.” Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences 9(1):1-16.
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The many indicators of nonprofit success as seen by nonprofit leaders
Maier, Florentine, Wenjuan Zheng, Christof Brandtner, and Leila Cornips. 2024. “The Many Indicators of Nonprofit Success as Seen by Nonprofit Leaders.” Nonprofit Management and Leadership 35(4):751-763.
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The publicness of private foundations: Online accountability and internet presence
Park, Gowun, and David Suárez. 2024. “The Publicness of Private Foundations: Online Accountability and Internet Presence.” Nonprofit Management and Leadership 35(2):307-327.
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Territoriality and the emergence of norms during the COVID-19 pandemic
Bergemann, Patrick, and Christof Brandtner. 2024. “Territoriality and the Emergence of Norms During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” American Journal of Sociology 130(5): 1150-1216.
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Neighborhood effects on integrative organizational practices in five global cities
Brandtner, Christof, Krystal Laryea, Gowun Park, Wei Luo, Michael Meyer, David Suárez, Hokyu Hwang, and Walter W. Powell. 2024. “Neighborhood effects on integrative organizational practices in five global cities.” Nature Cities 1(12):853-860.
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2023
Zheng, Wenjuan. 2023. “Converting Donation to Transaction: How Platform Capitalism Exploits Relational Labor in Non-Profit Fundraising.” Socio-Economic Review 21(4):1897-1916.
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A spark in the smokestacks: Environmental organizing in Beijing middle-class communities
Lin, Jean Yen-Chun. 2023. A Spark in the Smokestacks: Environmental Organizing in Beijing Middle-Class Communities. Columbia University Press.
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Exploring nonprofit advocacy research methods and design: A systematic review of the literature
Ward, Kevin D., Dyana P. Mason, Gowun Park, and Rachel Fyall. 2023. “Exploring Nonprofit Advocacy Research Methods and Design: A Systematic Review of the Literature.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 52(5):1210-1231.
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2022
// The Civic Lives of Cities Around the World: A Special Issue of Global Perspectives,
University of California Press
The six articles in this collection on the civic life of cities draw on more than 1,400 interviews with organizational leaders in San Francisco, Seattle, Shenzhen, Singapore, Sydney, and Vienna. Moving beyond the “big theories” of civil society, the articles illustrate the value of our dual emphasis on place and organizations by showing how comparisons of the people, practices, and partnerships of civil society organizations enable new middle-range theories of civil society.
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San Francisco Bay Area: A left coast metropolis grapples with
technocracy and inequality, by Krystal Laryea, Yi Zhao, and
Walter W. Powell
How do civic organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area straddle the paradox of challenging entrenched inequalities in an ostensibly progressive region that has been transformed by tech-driven wealth? Local nonprofits face the tension of maintaining access to elite resources while building connections to distribute those resources and navigate divides between the haves and have-nots.
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In this article, we seek to contribute to the literature on nonprofit sector effects by presenting a landscape of formal civil society in the Puget Sound, a region of the United States anchored by the city of Seattle. More specifically, we utilize the context of the Puget Sound to explore the underlying drivers that have been invoked to explain aggregate effects.
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This article explores how formal civic organizations are situated in entrepreneurial city-making in the Global South, when city governments promote their competitive advantage by boosting “social innovation” through nonprofits. Drawing on survey, interview, and social media data from a random sample of nonprofits in Shenzhen, China, our preliminary results highlight that the Shenzhen municipal government’s agenda to promote both global capitalism and authoritarian rules have shaped the urban spaces where nonprofits form and operate.
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The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the resilience of the nonprofit sector and beckoned the government to respond with digitalization programs that blend into the innovative capacity of the nonprofit sector. Consequently, digitalization has produced different versions of innovation that have helped tide nonprofits over this difficult time, in which crowdfunding has played an important role. In this article, we use two case studies to examine how nonprofits approach and situate crowdfunding in Singapore against the backdrop of the pandemic.
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In this essay, we explore the institutional embeddedness of the Sydney nonprofit sector via its changing relations with the state, market, and civil society. We explore the historical development of these relations and how these durable relations have shifted in recent years, putting pressures on the sector.
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Toward a better understanding of social origins theory: A historical narrative of Vienna’s civil society organizations, by Florentine Maier,
Michael Meyer, and Berta Terzieva
Social origins theory explains variation between civil societies by power relations between socioeconomic classes and by path dependencies. There have been few systematic reflections on which dimensions of civil society depend on these factors and can thus be explained by the theory. With the help of a historical narrative of the eventful history of Vienna’s civil society, in which traditional, liberal, social democratic, statist, and corporatist patterns feature, we tentatively identify ten such dimensions.
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2022
// Additional Publications
Green American city: Civic capacity and the distributed adoption of urban innovations
Brandtner, Christof. 2022. “Green American City: Civic Capacity and the Distributed Adoption of Urban Innovations”. American Journal of Sociology 128(3): 627-679.
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Organizational supererogation and the transformation of nonprofit accountability
Horvath, Aaron. 2022. “Organizational Supererogation and the Transformation of Nonprofit Accountability.” American Journal of Sociology 128(4):1031-76.
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Logue, Danielle, and Matthew Grimes. 2022. “Living Up to the Hype: How New Ventures Manage the Resource and Liability of Future-Oriented Visions Within the Nascent Market of Impact Investing.” Academy of Management Journal 65(3):1055-1082.
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Park, Gowun, and Benjamin M. Brunjes. 2022. “Engaging Citizens in Government Contracting: A Theoretical Approach for the Role of Social Service Nonprofits.” Perspectives on Public Management and Governance 5(4):317-329.
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Logue, Danielle, and Matthew Grimes. 2022. “Platforms for the People: Enabling Civic Crowdfunding through the Cultivation of Institutional Infrastructure.” Strategic Management Journal 43(3):663-693.
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Mosley, Jennifer E., David F. Suárez, and Hokyu Hwang. 2022. “Conceptualizing Organizational Advocacy Across the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector: Goals, Tactics and Motivation.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 50th anniversary issue.
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Luo, Wei, Wenjuan Zheng, and Yan Long. 2022. “Relational Work and its Pitfalls: Nonprofits’ Participation in Government-Sponsored Voluntary Accreditation.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 33(1):63-79.
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The governance of philanthropic foundations in authoritarian China: A power perspective
Qian, Wei. 2022. The Governance of Philanthropic Foundations in Authoritarian China: A Power Perspective. London: Routledge.
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2021
Brandtner, Christof, and Patricia Bromley. 2021. “Neoliberal Governance, Evaluations, and the Rise of Win–Win Ideology in Corporate Responsibility Discourse, 1960–2010.” Socio-Economic Review 20(4):1933-1960.
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Decoupling under scrutiny: Consistency of managerial talk and action in the age of nonprofit accountability
Brandtner, Christof. 2021. “Decoupling
Under Scrutiny: Consistency of Managerial Talk and Action in the Age of Nonprofit Accountability.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 50(5): 1053–78.
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Brandtner, Christof, Luís M. A. Bettencourt, Marc G. Berman, M. G and Andrew J. Stier. 2021. “Creatures of the State? Metropolitan Counties Compensated for State Inaction in Initial U.S. Response to COVID-19 Pandemic.” PLOS ONE 16(2): e0246249.
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2020
The structure of city action: Collaborative governance and sustainability practices in U.S. cities
Brandtner, Christof and David F. Suárez. 2020. “The Structure of City Action: Institutional Embeddedness and Sustainability Practices in U.S. Cities.” American Review of Public Administration 51(2):121–138.
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Hwang, Hokyu and Jeannette A. Colyvas. 2020. “Ontology, Levels of Society, and Degrees of Generality: Theorizing Actors as Abstractions in Institutional Theory.” Academy of Management Review 45(3): 570-595.
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Suárez, David F. and Hokyu Hwang. 2020. “Collaborations and Networks.” Pp. 317-334 in Routledge Companion to Nonprofit Management, edited by H. K. Anheier and S. Toepler. Routledge.
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2019
Beyond service provision: Advocacy and the construction of nonprofits as organizational actors
Hwang, Hokyu and David F. Suárez. 2019. “Beyond Service Provision: Advocacy and the Construction of Nonprofits as Organizational Actors.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 58:87-109.
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The proliferation and profusion of actors in institutional theory
Hwang, Hokyu, Jeannette A. Colyvas, and Gili S. Drori. 2019. “The Proliferation and Profusion of Actors in Institutional Theory.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 58:3-20.
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2018
Serve or conserve: Mission, strategy, and multi-level nonprofit change during the Great Recession
Horvath, Aaron, Christof Brandtner, and Walter W. Powell. 2018. “Serve or Conserve: Mission, Strategy, and Multi-Level Nonprofit Change During the Great Recession.” Voluntas 29(5): 976-993.
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2017
Achim Oberg, Valeska Korff, and Walter W. Powell. 2017. “Culture and Connectivity Intertwined: Visualizing Organizational Fields as Relational Structures and Meaning Systems,” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 53:1-31.
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Governing the crossroads: Interstitial communities and the fate of nonprofit evaluation
Valeska Korff, Achim Oberg, and Walter W. Powell, “Governing the Crossroads: Interstitial Communities and the Fate of Nonprofit Evaluation.” Ch. 6 in Networked Governance: New Research Perspectives, edited by B. Hollstein, W. Matiaske and K. Schnapp. Berlin: Springer, 2017.
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Organizational poisedness and the transformation of civic order in 19th century New York City
Victoria Johnson and Walter W. Powell. 2017. “Organizational Poisedness and the Transformation of Civic Order in 19th Century New York City.” Pp.179-230 in Organizations, Civil Society, and the Roots of Development, edited by N. Lamoreaux and J. Wallis. University of Chicago Press.
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Putting the world in orders: Plurality in organizational evaluation
Brandtner, Christof. 2017. “Putting the World in Orders: Plurality in Organizational Evaluation.” Sociological Theory 35(3):200–27.
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2016
Contributory or disruptive: Do new forms of philanthropy erode democracy?
Aaron Horvath and Walter W. Powell. 2016. “Contributory or Disruptive: Do New Forms of Philanthropy Erode Democracy?” pp. 87-122 in Philanthropy in Democratic Societies, edited by R. Reich, L. Bernholz, and C. Cordelli. University of Chicago Press.
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Click and mortar: Organizations on the web
Walter W. Powell, Christof Brandtner, and Aaron Horvath. 2016. “Click and Mortar: Organizations on the Web,” Research in Organizational Behavior 36:101-120.
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Institutional analysis in a digital era: Mechanisms and methods to understand emerging fields
Powell, Walter W., Achim Oberg, Valeska Korff, Carrie Oelberger, and Karina Kloos. 2016. “Institutional Analysis in a Digital Era: Mechanisms and Methods to Understand Emerging Fields.” Pp. 305-344 in New Themes in Institutional Analysis, edited by G. Krücken, C. Mazza, R. E. Meyer, and P. Walgenbach. Edward Elgar Publishing.
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2015
Internal and external determinants of formal plans in the nonprofit Sector
Hwang, Hokyu, and Patricia Bromley. 2015. “Internal and External Determinants of Formal Plans in the Nonprofit Sector.” International Public Management Journal 18(4): 568-588.
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Chandler, David, and Hokyu Hwang. 2015. “Learning from Learning Theory: A Model of Organizational Adoption Strategies at the Microfoundations of Institutional Theory.” Journal of Management 41(5):1446-1476.
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Interstitial organizations as conversational bridges
Valeska Korff, Achim Oberg, and Walter W. Powell. 2015. “Interstitial Organizations as Conversational Bridges,” Bulletin of the Association of Information Science and Technology 41(2): 34-38.
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2013
Decoupling revisited: Common pressures, divergent strategies
in the U.S. nonprofit sector
Patricia Bromley, Hokyu Hwang and Walter W. Powell. 2013. “Decoupling Revisited: Common Pressures, Divergent Strategies in the U.S. Nonprofit Sector,” M@n@gement 15(5):480-501.
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Resource constraints or cultural conformity? Nonprofit relationships with businesses
Suárez, David, and Hokyu Hwang. 2013. “Resource Constraints or Cultural Conformity? Nonprofit Relationships with Businesses.” Voluntas 24(3):581-605.
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2012
Patricia Bromley and Walter W. Powell. 2012. “From Smoke and Mirrors to Walking the Talk: Characteristics and Consequences of Decoupling in the Contemporary World.” Academy of Management Annals 6: 483-530.
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2011
Problematizing actors and institutions in institutional work
Hwang, Hokyu and Jeannette A. Colyvas. 2011. “Problematizing Actors and Institutions in Institutional Work.” Journal of Management Inquiry 20(1): 62-66.
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Collaboration and professionalization: The contours of public sector funding for nonprofits
Suárez, David F. 2011. “Collaboration and Professionalization: The Contours of Public Sector Funding for Nonprofit Organizations.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 21(2): 307-326.
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2010
Street credentials and management backgrounds: Careers of nonprofit executives in an evolving sector
Suárez, David F. 2010. “Street Credentials and Management Backgrounds: Careers of Nonprofit Executives in an Evolving Sector.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 39(4): 696-716.
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2009
Global organization: Global rationalization and ‘organization’ as scripted actorhood
Drori, Gili S., John W. Meyer, and Hokyu Hwang. 2009. “Global Organization: Global Rationalization and ‘Organization’ as Scripted Actorhood.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 27:17-43.
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The rationalization of charity: The manifestations of professionalism in the nonprofit sector
Hwang, Hokyu and Walter W. Powell. 2009. “The Rationalization of Charity: The Manifestations of Professionalism in the Nonprofit Sector.” Administrative Science Quarterly 54(2):268-98.
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Nonprofit advocacy and civic engagement on the Internet
Suárez, David F. 2009. “Nonprofit Advocacy and Civic Engagement on the Internet.” Administration & Society 41(3):267-289.
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2008
Civic engagement and nonprofit lobbying in California
Suárez, David and Hokyu Hwang. 2008. “Civic Engagement and Nonprofit Lobbying in California.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 37(1): 92-112.
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2005
Lost and found in the translation of strategic plans and websites
Hwang, Hokyu, and David Suárez. 2005. “Lost and Found in the Translation of Strategic Plans and Websites.” Pp. 71-93 in Global Ideas: How Ideas, Objects and Practices Travel in the Global Economy, edited by B. Czarniawska and G. Sevon. Copenhagen Business School Press.