Urban Welfare Regimes, Organizational Cultures, and Client-Staff Tie Activation: A Comparison of Transitional Housing Programs in Los Angeles and Tokyo

ABSTRACT:

With state safety nets failing to keep up with expanding urban poverty, ties to community organizations can provide crucial resources. But what explains variation in such tie activation at urban, organizational, and individual levels? I advance a multilevel framework of organizational client–staff tie activation that centralizes the role of trust and specifies effects of multiple social contexts. I apply the framework to an exploratory comparison of transitional housing programs in Los Angeles and Tokyo, including analysis of qualitative data collected among clients, staff, and administrators. I argue that urban welfare regimes and organizational cultures are key contexts shaping how macro-level forces like neoliberalism intersect with micro-level processes of social capital building in differentiated ways. Urban scholars can inform theory and practice by further analyzing how organizational-level trust building practices of holism and flexibility can be affected by urban-level regulations on scope of aid and inter-organizational ties.

Notes

Data for Los Angeles are from AmericanFactfinder website of the US Census Bureau (factfinder2.census.gov) accessed on 5/1/13. Data for Tokyo are an analysis of Japanese census data by a private researcher accessed 5/1/13 at: http://www2.ttcn.ne.jp/honkawa/7357.html

Data on Los Angeles from LAHSA () and AmericanFactfinder. Tokyo data as reported by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) downloaded on 4/9/13 from: http://www.fukushihoken.metro.tokyo.jp/seikatsu/rojo/homelesstaisaku.files/homeless2412.pdf. and http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/PROFILE/overview03.htm

These figures exclude cities such as Glendale, Long Beach, and Pasadena that conducted independent counts.

Tokujinkō, the union of semigovernmental organizations operating transitional housing in Tokyo, did not allow me to recruit client interviewees directly at their facilities. So I recruited through private NPOs and advocacy groups that provided consultation services for clients of all 5 Tokyo programs. For purposes of comparison with Los Angeles, I focus on the strong similarities in organizational cultures and pressures from the organizational field at the sacrifice of more subtle differences among these programs within Tokyo.

I am an advanced, non-native speaker of Japanese, have conducted fieldwork on homelessness in Japan sporadically for 20 years, and completed all interviews in Tokyo in Japanese. However, all interviews were tape recorded and transcribed by a native speaker before analysis.

I interviewed more staff persons in Tokyo because I covered five programs there, whereas I only covered one program in Los Angeles. Also, I conducted staff interviews in Tokyo as part of a collaborative research project (Kitagawa, ), facilitating collection of a larger sample.

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Matthew D. Marr

Matthew Marr earned his PhD in sociology from UCLA in 2007. Marr’s research focuses on global and local contexts of urban marginality in American and Japanese cities, employing methods such as longitudinal interviews, participant observation, comparative case studies, and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. His book Better Must Come (2015) focuses on processes of exiting homelessness in Los Angeles and Tokyo, exploring how they are shaped by contexts operating at multiple levels of social analysis, from the global to the individual. Marr’s work has been published in journals including the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Cities, Urban Geography, and Housing Policy Debate.