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Publications (66)
This study examines the gender gap in Protestant churches’ leadership and its connection to head clergy compensation, using the National Study of Congregations’ Economic Practices (NSCEP) data. The analysis reveals that women's leadership as head clergy is most common within smaller and theologically liberal churches and during a time of declining...
Organizational researchers use a variety of methods to obtain sampling frames. The utility of these methods, however, is constrained by access restrictions, limited coverage, prohibitive costs, and cumbersome formats. This article presents a new method for generating organizational sampling frames that is cost-effective, uses publicly available dat...
Even amidst a decline in religious affiliation, nearly half of the U.S. population still attends religious services at least once a month, and congregations remain the single largest non-profit organizational type across the nation. Therefore, congregational influence on political attitudes and behavior is a crucial line of inquiry. We analyze inte...
This study analyzes how community-based organizations navigate social differences and leverage those differences to enhance their effectiveness. Analyses for this research are based primarily on data I collected for the National Study of Community Organizing (NSCO). The organizations in the NSCO bring together a broad array of local organizations t...
This multimethod study investigates strategic collaboration in alliances connecting politically engaged religious and secular social movement organizations. We assess the impact of religious-secular strategic alliances on movement political efficacy by analyzing data from a national survey of the community organizing field to compare organizations...
Nonprofit organizations are influenced by multiple institutional logics. However, data and methodological limitations have restricted scholars to classifying organizations solely according to activity-based logics and hindered investigation of alternative logics. This article presents a method for measuring organizational identity—a critical compon...
We conducted a cross-sectional secondary analysis of data from the 2012 National Congregation Study, a nationally representative survey of religious congregations in the United States ( N = 1,331). Multivariate logistic regression was used to identify congregational characteristics associated with providing substance use support programing. Nearly...
Civil society organizations (CSOs) are sites for creating and strengthening social ties among participants. Ties are developed when participants in CSO convenings (meetings, events, activities) interact, but convenings vary in the amount of interaction they generate. Theory and research suggest that the physical spaces where convenings occur may im...
Religious organizations are among the oldest and most influential institutions in the world. Within the U.S. nonprofit sector, they are more numerous than any other type of organization, receive over one-third of all charitable dollars, and appear within every major domain. Given the scale and pervasiveness of religious organizations in the nonprof...
This study integrates social capital theory and network analysis to explore the relationship between interorganizational networks and organizational action. It analyzes the collaborative partnerships that religious congregations form to provide social services, and it examines how these ties are associated with the number and types of programs they...
This study illuminates the size, scope, and impact of U.S. faith-based nonprofits in the international affairs sector. Through analysis of IRS microdata, we estimate the prevalence, total revenue, and direct charitable giving to Organizations with Religious Expression (OREs) within the International Affairs subsector (n = 262). Our study provides n...
Charitable activity is a core tenet of most faith traditions, and many charitable organizations have a religious identity. However, little is known about the prevalence and scale of faith-based foundations, and how they differ from secular foundations. This study identifies the field of public foundations, differentiates between faith-based and sec...
With the increase in the severity of natural disasters linked to climate change, the role religious congregations play in response is not well known, despite their substantial involvement in general charitable activity. Most disaster response research is event‐based, ex post, and not focused on religious institutions or donor capacity consideration...
Organizational researchers use a variety of methods to obtain sampling frames. The utility of these methods, however, is constrained by access restrictions, limited coverage, prohibitive costs, and cumbersome formats. This article presents a new method for generating sampling frames for any type of organization that is cost-effective, uses publicly...
What happens at convenings held by community-based civil society organizations and how do they influence organizational outcomes? Although ethnographies provide details about organizations’ internal dynamics, they offer limited insights into the distribution of those dynamics and their impact on outcomes. This article describes systematic social ob...
Coalitions of community organizations and labor unions have played a central role in the recent expansion of municipal legislation regarding low-wage work. To date, most studies of community-labor coalitions have focused on their successes in meeting policy goals set by organized labor. This paper shifts focus to the challenges community organizati...
Diversity is a goal for many organizations, yet it is not always connected to improved performance. This study advances diversity-performance research by examining the effect of engaging social differences. The analysis uses data from a national study of organizations containing information on the race, gender, class, and religion of each organizat...
Why are some organizations more successful than others at involving socially diverse groups of people? Previous research emphasizes the role representative leaders play in recruiting diverse constituencies. This study extends that research by analyzing how an organization’s group style—its customs that shape everyday interactions—influences constit...
Although extensive research has examined whether diversity hinders or improves organizational performance, the aggregate results remain inconclusive. Social bridging theories argue that diverse organizations perform better than homogeneous organizations, while social bonding theories argue that diverse organizations perform worse. When scholars tes...
Surveys of religious congregations are a mainstay of sociological research on organized religion in the United States. How accurate, reliable, and comparable are the data generated from the disparate methods used by researchers? We analyze four congregational surveys to show how two components of data collection—sampling design and survey response...
Religious organizations are among the oldest and most influential institutions in the world. Within the U.S. nonprofit sector, they are more numerous than any other type of organization, receive over one-third of all charitable giving, and appear within almost every subfield. Yet, despite this overwhelming presence, relatively little is known about...
We present four modes of public religion—secularist, generalist pluralist, particularist pluralist, and exclusivist—and discuss conditions under which white evangelicals employ these different modes. Ethnographic research on white evangelicals participating in multifaith initiatives in Los Angeles, Portland, Boston, and Atlanta indicates that they...
Organizations are often core sites for the production and perpetuation of social inequality. Although the United States is becoming more racially diverse, organizational elites remain disproportionately white, and this mismatch contributes to increasing racial inequality. This article examines whether and how leaders of color within predominantly w...
The National Study of Congregations' Economic Practices (NSCEP) examines congregations' theological, cultural, and practical orientations toward money and generates a deeper understanding of how congregations receive, manage, and spend their financial resources. While much social science research has assessed religious giving, the vast majority of...
Religious congregations in the US receive substantially more philanthropic contributions than any other category of organizations, yet little research has investigated how congregations receive, manage, and spend these donations. Although the economic practice of religious giving has been researched extensively, most of this research has focused on...
Food insecurity has been a persistent problem in the U.S., and yet over the past three decades, federally funded food programs have become more restrictive. Scholars and policymakers have inquired whether the nonprofit sector is increasing its food provision activities to address this unmet need. This study analyzes data from the U.S. Census and a...
The organizations in the National Study of Community Organizing Organizations (NSCOO) are located throughout the country and share a similar structure and mission. They operate as community-based organizations that bring together individuals from their member institutions to address social, economic, and political issues that affect poor, low-incom...
Religious congregations play an important role in HIV prevention and care. However, most research on congregation-based HIV activities has focused on prevention. Using data from a nationally representative survey of U.S. congregations, this study found that 18.6% of congregations were engaged in some type of HIV activity; 8.7% engaged in prevention...
As Tocqueville observed the emergence of democracy in the USA, he noted the central role religion played in undergirding democratic life. Nearly 200 years later, it is unclear whether religion continues to possess sufficient capacity to promote democratic engagement. This study links organizational theory with research on the structural and cultura...
Muslim Americans often encounter discriminatory practices similar to those experienced by other minority groups living in the U.S. Such practices range from mass incarceration and anti-immigration efforts to racial and religious profiling. In response, a growing number of Muslim American leaders are organizing their communities and collaborating wi...
Objective:
This study assessed the prevalence of and factors associated with congregation-based programming in support of people with mental illness.
Methods:
To estimate the proportion of congregations that provide mental health programming, this study reports analyses of survey responses from the 2012 National Congregations Study, a nationally...
Brad R. Fulton and Richard L. Wood’s chapter uses a national dataset of faith-based community organizing (FBCO) coalitions to provide an overview of an organizational field that is central to the progressive religious activist field as a whole. The chapter focuses on the high levels of religious diversity, racial/ethnic diversity, and socioeconomic...
This study integrates social capital theory and network analysis to explore the relationship betweeninterorganizational networks and organizational action. It analyzes the collaborative partnerships that religiouscongregations form to provide social services, and it examines how these ties are associated with the number andtypes of programs they of...
When congregations seek to address social needs, they often pursue this goal through acts of service and political engagement. Over the past three decades, a tremendous amount of research has been dedicated to analyzing congregation-based service provision and political participation. However, little is known about how congregations’ involvement in...
Surveys provide a critical source of data for scholars, yet declining response rates are threatening the quality of data being collected. This threat is particularly acute among organizational studies that use key informants—the mean response rate for published studies is 34 percent. This article describes several response enhancing strategies and...
There is a strong and well-documented relationship between religion and social stratification. Social scientists have studied this connection for decades, and the field has recently gained considerable momentum. We survey recent theoretical approaches to studying religion and stratification. We then provide an overview of some of the most important...
This chapter draws on data from the National Study of Community Organizing Coalitions to analyze a fundamental dimension of diversity in the national field of faith-based community organizing: the racial/ethnic diversity of its member institutions. Member institutions are primarily religious congregations from a variety of religious traditions, but...
This chapter offers a case study of one of the primary sponsors of faith-based community organizing in the United States, the PICO National Network. It analyzes the organizational dynamics underlying PICO’s transition from a race-neutral analysis of American society to an analysis focused partly on racial injustice and the struggle for racial equit...
This chapter introduces the National Study of Community Organizing Coalitions, an original survey of all faith-based community organizing coalitions in the U.S.. This study, which achieved a 94% response rate, offers the first comprehensive data on this field; in combination with a more limited earlier study, it allows assessment of changes between...
This unconventional chapter presents the full text of Wood’s 2013 interview of Rev. Michael McBride, an African American Pentecostal pastor who serves on the national staff of the PICO National Network as the Director of Urban Strategies. The interview thus offers the voice of one key national figure central to racial equity work in the field of fa...
This brief introduction to the second half of A Shared Future discusses the concept of ‘ethical democracy’ and links it to the following chapters’ case study of organizational transformation in the PICO National Network. It also explains why the work of faith-based community organizing might matter in large scale societal terms in the years ahead.
This chapter summarizes how faith-based community organizing challenges three key demons of contemporary American democracy: rising economic inequality, racial injustice, and the continuing paralysis of federal policy-making. It also summarizes this book’s analysis of the dynamics through which some sectors of faith-based community organizing have...
This unconventional conclusion considers the broad struggle for ethical democracy in the contemporary world. The chapter draws on the work of Jurgen Habermas to argue that constructing ethical democracy will require re-anchoring democratic life within society. Contemporary democratic dilemmas arise due to the gargantuan growth of the ‘Systems’ of P...
This chapter analyzes ‘targeted universalism’ in action, via the “Lifelines to Healing” campaign (subsequently renamed the “LiveFree” campaign). Lifelines to Healing/LiveFree is the PICO National Network’s effort to address racial equity, in this case by advocating for policies to fight urban violence and the mass incarceration of African American...
Three demons bedevil contemporary American democracy in the domestic realm: economic inequality, the paralysis of federal policy-making, and racial injustice. American politics in the years ahead will be driven by the struggle over whether to address these demons, and how best to do so. In the background of that struggle lies a related tension: tha...
This chapter draws on data from the National Study of Community Organizing Coalitions to analyze the individual-level diversity among two sets of key leaders within faith-based community organizing: professional staff and governing board members. The chapter focuses on racial and ethnic diversity, but also examines socioeconomic, gender, and age di...
Purpose
Identify and compare predictors of the existence of congregational human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and other health programs.
Design
Cross-sectional study.
Setting
United States.
Subjects
A nationally representative sample of 1506 U.S. congregations surveyed in the National Congregations Study (2006–2007).
Measures
Key informants at...
Surveys provide a critical source of data for scholars, yet declining response rates are threatening the quality of the data being collected. This threat is particularly acute among organizational studies that use key informants—the mean response rate for published studies is 34 percent. This article describes several response enhancing techniques...
Organizations can benefit from being internally diverse, but they may also face significant challenges arising from such diversity. Potential benefits include increased organizational innovation, legitimacy, and strategic capacity; challenges include threats to organizational stability, efficacy, and survival. In this article, we analyze the dynami...
Background: Faith-based organizations are uniquely positioned to address the HIV epidemic. They represent trusted social networks that can disseminate health information, and many have a history of engaging in social issues. However, few congregations have developed HIV programs. We examined the extent to which congregational factors and community...
Community organizing in America is alive and well and being vigorously practiced in the version we call “institution-based community organizing.” This national study shows that in the last decade institution-based community organizing has significantly increased its power base as it continues to bridge divides that deeply bedevil American politics–...
Interfaith work in the United States takes diverse forms: from grass-roots collaboration on projects such as feeding the homeless, to locally-sponsored interfaith dialogues, collaborations sponsored by national denominational bodies and shared work on federal ‘faith-based initiatives’. This article profiles the characteristics and dynamics of a par...
Online survey instrument for the 2011 National Study of Community Organizing Organizations
The ambivalent response of many black churches to current social issues has caused some scholars to question the centrality of black churches within African-American communities. Using a nationally representative sample of black congregations, this study engages the debate about the institutional centrality of black churches by focusing on their re...
