Please join us for the last meeting this quarter of the Money, Markets, and Governance Workshop, on Tuesday Dec. 1st, at 4:30PM – 6PM, at Social Science Research Building, class 106
Christopher M. Graziul
PhD Candidate, University of Chicago, Sociology
Fields in Community Context: Opportunity Constraint and Religious Life
Discussant: Forest Gregg
PhD Candidate, University of Chicago, Sociology
Abstract:
Principles of organizational ecology, especially the population ecology of organizations, are often studied relative to a single market sector. This reflects intense research focus on firms, whose relevant competitors and intended customers may be ambiguously defined, but whose organizational field remains fundamentally tied to the products and services being offered. I propose a new approach to organizational ecology as the nesting of social fields. Using a unique combination of within-organization survey data and ecological data to study the conditions under which churches come to facilitate the social lives of worshipers, I show that a field-based perspective allows researchers to invert the traditional relationship between resource spaces and market sectors. Rather than defining the dimensions of a resource space according to the characteristics of a particular market sector, fields make it possible to explore the local interaction of multiple sectors coexisting in the same geographically bounded community.