Human Services Organizations as Systems Social workers use the person-in-environment approach to understand the relationship between individuals and

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Administration in Social Work

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Theoretical Perspectives on the Social Environment to Guide Management and Community Practice An Organization-in-Environment Approach

Elizabeth A. Mulroy PhD

To cite this article: Elizabeth A. Mulroy PhD (2004) Theoretical Perspectives on the Social Environment to Guide Management and Community Practice, Administration in Social Work, 28:1, 77-96, DOI: 10.1300/J147v28n01_06

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1300/J147v28n01_06

Published online: 23 Sep 2008.

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Theoretical Perspectives on the Social Environment to Guide

Management and Community Practice: An Organization-in-Environment Approach

Elizabeth A. Mulroy, PhD

ABSTRACT. This paper introduces a conceptual framework called Or- ganization-in-Environment that is intended to help social work students, particularly those preparing for careers in management and community practice, understand the complexity of the social environment in the con- text of a global economy. This model is based on two assumptions. First, organizations and communities are embedded in large, complex macro systems that helped to create institutional barriers of the past. Second, or- ganizations are civic actors with the potential to strengthen communities and change institutional inequities set in larger societal systems. Theories of social justice, the political economy, vertical and horizontal linkages, organization/environment dimensions, and interorganizational collabora- tion are presented and used to help analyze the model. Case examples of privatization, gentrification, and homelessness are used to illustrate theory for practice. Finally, implications are drawn for a future-oriented practice that emphasizes external relations and their political dimensions: strategic management, interorganizational collaboration, community building, re- gional action, and a commitment to social justice. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress. com> © 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

Elizabeth A. Mulroy is Associate Professor, School of Social Work, University of Maryland-Baltimore, 525 West Redwood Street, Baltimore, MD 21201 (E-mail: [email protected]).

The author thanks Michael J. Austin for his very helpful comments on earlier versions of the article.

Administration in Social Work, Vol. 28(1) 2004 http://www.haworthpress.com/web/ASW

 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Digital Object Identifier: 10.1300/J147v28n01_06 77

KEYWORDS. Social justice, social environment theory, organizational change, social change, community theory, collaboration

The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of the social environment and to consider some theoretical perspectives of management and community practice. The study of macro level factors begins with an examination of the social environ- ment; namely understanding how people interact–how they respond, adapt, and cope with family, friends, peers, and intimate others, and how they interact in less personal relationships within work organizations, schools, or associations in which a person assumes a role as citizen, producer, consumer, or client. It should then exam- ine social norms, social institutions, and institutional arrangements–the working agreements about the distribution of wealth, power, prestige, privilege associated with race, ethnicity, gender, age, mental status, or sexual orientation. While de- signed to create stability for society, institutional arrangements can be a source of conflict for those who experience institutional inequities (Mulroy, 1995a).

Students of management and community practice, and in fact all social work stu- dents, need to critically examine how macro level factors affect the lives of people who live in neighborhoods and communities, especially the lives of very low-income children and their families who live in neighborhood poverty. Gephart (1997) writes:

Existing research suggests the interaction of several forces in American cities over the past fifty years has led to the increased spatial concentration of poverty, the geographic spread of concentrated poverty, and the in- creased clustering of poverty with other forms of social and economic dis- advantage. These forces have altered the context of urban poverty at the community level and created the neighborhoods and communities of con- centrated poverty . . . (1994, pp. 3-4)

The concept of the social environment becomes more holistic when we in- clude the physical environment, especially in relation to land use and population distribution (Norlin & Chess, 1997). The question for management and commu- nity practice is how do we understand the social environment in this way, and how do we educate students to manage and change it?

While a discussion of the social environment usually begins with community theory and organization theory as if communities and organizations were separate topics, a broader and more integrated conceptual framework is needed for the edu- cational task at hand. Communities and organizations are located in larger, com- plex systems as part of an ecology of shifting resources and constraints. Based on a theoretical foundation that informs this reality, the next generation of practitio- ners will need to:

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• Identify and understand the critical strategic issues external to their organi- zations.

• Assess the inter-relatedness and cross-cutting impacts of the issues. • Analyze how the issues affect their agency’s mission, purposes, resources,

and operations. • Learn which other organizations are affected across a range of community

types such as geographic community and communities of interest. • Determine which theoretical perspectives offer guidance to inform a range

of practice innovations that will help to solve the presenting problems while holding firm to the overriding goal of social justice.

This article examines the social environment by building on social systems and ecological theories (not reviewed here) in order to focus on the political economy, vertical and horizontal linkages, organization-environment relations, and inter- organizational collaboration. These are selected for illustrative purposes to dem- onstrate how they can inform macro-level practice. The goal of helping students understand the social environment is related to the following four points:

1. The social environment and the physical environment are tightly linked and intertwined.

2. Factors and relationships external to an organization are important. 3. Public policies and societal factors are continuous forces of change not

only for organizations but also for the communities in which organizations are located.

4. A commitment to social justice is a core principle that frames management and community practice.

A MODEL OF ORGANIZATION-IN-ENVIRONMENT

Social Justice

Social justice, a core value of social work (Reamer, 2000), drives the model (see Figure 1). Social justice has historically guided reformers and social workers to re-frame the pressing social issues of the times and to engage in the complex work of finding solutions to vexing societal problems (Addams, 1910; Wald, 1915; Schorr, 1964; Schorr, 1997; Patti, 2000). Today this means confronting the rearrangement of institutional barriers that emerged in our urban areas during the past 30 years–barriers that helped to create and sustain neighborhood poverty that continue to affect the health and well-being of residents and prevent the advance- ment of many very low-income people, especially minorities.

Elizabeth A. Mulroy 79

The starting point for most discussions of social justice is the theory of justice developed by philosopher John Rawls (1972) who proposed three guiding prin- ciples: equality in basic liberties, equality of opportunity for advancement, and positive discrimination for the underprivileged in order to ensure equity. Rawls derived these principles of justice on what he believed reasonable people, with no prior knowledge or stake in the outcome, would apply to a society in which they were to live (Ife, 1996).

Ife (1996) moves the analysis of social justice from the individual to the commu- nity level. Following Ife’s thinking, social justice at the macro level is based on six

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Social Justice

Level 3 Societal/Policy Forces

Level 2 Locality-Based Community

IMPACTS SOLUTIONS AgencyLevel 1

Effectiveness

Efficiency Equity

Job, Housing,

Education, Services

Economic Globalization Market Economy

Mulroy, E. 2003

FIGURE 1. Organization-in-Environment: A Conceptual Framework

principles: structural disadvantage, empowerment, needs, rights, peace and non-vio- lence, and participatory democracy. He argues that unless changes are made to the basic structures of oppression, which create and perpetuate an unequal and inequita- ble society, any social justice strategy has limited value. “. . . all programmes that claim a social justice label need to be evaluated in terms of their relationship with the dominant forms of structural oppression, specifically class, gender, and race/ethnic- ity” (1996, p. 55). He believes that a specific commitment to addressing the inequal- ities of class, gender and race/ethnicity must be a core element of any social justice strategy, and the guiding principle of community practice (p. 56).

Harvey (1973), writing from an economic and urban perspective states, “The evidence suggests that the forces of urbanization are emerging strongly and moving to dominate the centre stage of world history . . . We have the opportu- nity to create space, to harness creatively the forces making for urban differenti- ation. But in order to seize these opportunities we have to confront the forces that create cities as alien environments, that push urbanization in directions alien to our individual or collective purpose. To confront these forces we first have to understand them” (pp. 313-314). That is, social workers must first understand how the forces of oppression operate across a metropolitan landscape in order to devise strategies capable of bringing about lasting change.

Levels of Influence

Figure 1 depicts a social environment in which communities and agencies are part of larger systems. The first set of arrows suggests that macro level factors Im- pact communities and the organizations in them. The second set of arrows sug- gests that organizations and communities work to find Solutions to help break down or change oppressive institutional barriers in the larger society. The circular pattern emphasizes the interconnectedness of the ideas presented (Ife, 1996).

Level 3–Societal/Policy Factors

Macro level factors include, but are not limited to the market economy, globalization, immigration, poverty, and a range of public policies. Institu- tional arrangements are formulated at Level 3. These may include, for exam- ple, international real estate investment and financial lending decisions and supportive public policies related to housing and urban development; na- tional or regional labor market needs and supportive federal policies and reg- ulations related to immigration; medical, managed care, and health facilities decisions driven by insurance companies; or shifting national political prior- ities toward privatization of public services generally and the adoption of a contracting and purchase of services culture.

Elizabeth A. Mulroy 81

Political Economy. The political economy concerns the intersection of events and decisions in a community and the wider polity that have economic implica- tions and political considerations. For example, the political economy involves powerful elite forces that own and control economic capital, use economic re- sources to promote industrial growth, and compete for control over modes of pro- duction and resources. Land, for example, is considered an economic resource to be brought to its highest and best use. The urban political economy creates the physical environment through real estate development and the highly politicized processes of land use planning and zoning with their manifestations in state and local-level land use plans, governance, and control (Feagin, 1998; Gottdiener, 1994; Lefebrvre, 1991). In The Political Economy of the Black Ghetto, Tabb (1970) asserted that racism is perpetuated by elements of oppression within an economic and political system that must be understood as a system (p. vii).

The political economy can also be applied to organizations and their environ- ments (Hasenfeld, 1983; 1992). The capacity of a human service organization to survive and to deliver services in the 21st century is based on its ability to mobi- lize power, legitimacy, and economic resources (Hasenfeld, 1992, p. 96). For nonprofit organizations this is reflected in the increased degree of dependency on resources external to their own organizations from federal and state grants and contracts, and private philanthropic grants from foundations (Gibelman, 2000; Martin, 2000). Functions of management include the acquisition of a wide range of external funding, financial control through management of multiple grants and contracts, impacts on program implementation, competition among internal programs for scarce resources, and effects on organization-wide fiscal stability (Gummer, 1990). Implications of resource dependency include the po- litical effects on nonprofit and public human service agencies when national and state budget priorities shift, and newly elected legislative bodies fail to reauthorize allocated funds for existing demonstration and other programs mid-stream in their implementation cycles (Mulroy & Lauber, 2002). The con- cept of privatization is used in the following example to illustrate the ways in which macro level factors can operate in the social environment, in this case on agencies directly. (A range of diverse macro level factors can be introduced in Level 3 for purposes of analysis.)

Example: Privatization. Privatization is the shifting of service delivery from the public sector to the private for-profit and nonprofit sectors through contracts and the purchase of services. It is a market-oriented approach in which individ- ual nonprofit human service organizations compete for public funds on an un- even playing field. It increased competition first within the nonprofit sector as large and small nonprofits vied with each other for public sector contracts in a period of overall reduced federal expenditures for domestic social services. Competition then increased outside the sector as nonprofits had to compete with

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private firms. Hard hit were community-based nonprofit organizations with so- cial change missions (Fabricant & Fisher, 2002).

The for-profit sector has benefited from privatization, particularly after pas- sage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. Highly resourced, large corporations with no ties to local communities offered large state and county agencies the chance to purchase packages of diverse services that included management information systems, welfare-to-work job training programs, Medicaid billing, case management, and direct services to recipients (Frumkin & Andre-Clark, 2000).

Many smaller nonprofit human service organizations faced serious dilemmas such as being priced out of existence, scaling back services to the poorest or sickest, and proving in the short term that their interventions get results. When viewed from a social justice perspective, implications of privatization can be drawn for service equity, access, cost, continuity, and quality of care (see Gibelman & Demone, 2002).

Level 2–The Geographic Community

Institutional arrangements developed in Level 3 are absorbed and imple- mented in Level 2. The locality-based community can be a neighborhood, city, county, or other jurisdiction with boundaries and an interactional field (Warren, 1978) of subunits that serve collective needs. The locality-based definition of community for Level 2 was selected because it has a geographic boundary, be it a neighborhood, city, or county that students in field placement internships can readily identify. Other definitions of community can be woven in as needed (see Fellin, 2001).

Vertical Links as “Windows on the World.” The pioneering work of Roland Warren (1971; 1977; 1978) provides a powerful and provocative concept for an- alyzing communities in terms of their horizontal and vertical patterns. The hori- zontal pattern is understood to be an “interactional field” that viewed community as the aggregate of people and organizations occupying a geo- graphic area whose interactions represent systemic interconnections (1978). He explicitly stated that the interactional arena was of social rather than physical space. The importance of vertical ties was that they linked community units to units outside the community, or to the macro system and thus to the larger soci- ety and culture. Such ties could have a number of aspects that were economic, thought systems or ideologies, economic roles or occupations, technologies, public behavior, common values and norms, patterns of land use, social stratifi- cation, power structures, organizational linkages, and social problems (Warren, 1978, pp. 432-437).

Elizabeth A. Mulroy 83

The concept of a vertical pattern of ties is an intriguing idea to me because it introduces this question: To what extent does the strength of a community’s ver- tical ties determine the resources and support it gets from national, state, city, or county sources in an increasingly global economy? My interest in this question launched the trajectory of my own research based on the macro system ap- proach. I have attempted to systematically analyze relationships between as- pects of the macro system and community subunits (see for example, Mulroy, 2000; 1997; 1995a; 1988; Mulroy & Shay, 1997; Mulroy & Shay, 1998; Mulroy & Lauber, 2002). The reported findings suggest that a community’s physical envi- ronment is tightly linked with the social environment; patterns of land use such as urban sprawl can determine the status of a community’s health and the well-being of its residents; and in the global economy economic decisions made by multi-national firms with no national or local community affiliation or loy- alty profoundly affect both. The gentrification of a community will serve to il- lustrate these concepts.

Example: Gentrification. Staying with the theme of neighborhood and con- centrated poverty introduced at the beginning of the paper, the concept of gentri- fication is used to illustrate two main points; namely the decline of urban neighborhoods and urban sprawl.

First, the decline of many urban neighborhoods was part of a larger pattern of urbanization and sprawl that occurred over decades. Federal and state housing and urban policies, for example, are examples of vertical links that attempted to respond to urban blight in inner city neighborhoods and central business districts by targeting deteriorating commercial districts and residential neighborhoods for revitalization. Housing is a connector between the physical and social envi- ronments in all neighborhoods, including those targeted for gentrification. Housing concerns affordability, security, safety, health, neighbor and social re- lations, and confers status. The location of housing determines a household’s ac- cess to facilities, services, jobs, transportation systems, safety, and quality schools (Mulroy, 1995a; 1988). It affects the formation of social networks, and thus the ability of residents to build social and human capital (Coleman, 1988; Wilson, 1996). Federal and state housing policies require cities and counties to have land use plans, and housing is a core element.

The increasingly high cost of suburban housing made the revitalized districts attractive to many people who worked in the central business district and they were enticed to move back into the urban core. The return of upper- and mid- dle-income people to the central city was an explicit public policy and an eco- nomic development goal of gentrification. New mixed-income communities were created that stabilized entire city blocks. Gentrified neighborhoods, how- ever, tended to displace and disperse many local very-low income residents and furthered their downward mobility in search of rental housing they could afford

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(Mulroy, 1988). Most urban neighborhoods, however, did not receive public and private investments for gentrification.

From the political economy perspective, the processes of urbanization such as real estate and financial lending decisions made by national and multi-na- tional firms with vertical ties to a neighborhood–and bolstered by help from sup- portive federal housing and urban development policies–changed the spatial organization of communities with serious impacts on poor neighborhoods (Feagin, 1998). For example, our understanding of where people live in a city and why they live there has traditionally been guided by concentric zone theory developed in the 1920s. Simply put, ecological processes result in city growth and development that evolve outward in five zones of concentric rings: (1) the central business district, (2) transitional manufacturing zone, (3) worker housing close to low-wage manufacturing jobs, (4) higher income housing, and (5) the suburbs. (See Fellin, 2001 for a more complete discussion.) The theory of hous- ing filtration postulates that as low-wage households in worker housing save money they would seek better housing and move out to the next residential zone, freeing up their multi-family housing for the next group of low-wage workers, typically new immigrant groups. Housing “filtered” down in this pattern of sup- ply and demand. Over time, this “filtering” of the housing market was the basis for private builders to construct new housing in the suburbs. Housing has always been a private market function in America, and therefore private developers ra- tionally build where the demand for expensive housing and therefore greater profits will be highest–the suburbs. It was assumed that there would always be an adequate supply of housing stock for the poor in older inner-neighborhoods (Mulroy, 1995b).

Second, the effects of urban sprawl have restructured communities and nei- ther concentric zone theory nor housing filtration may work as theorized. When a neighborhood was gentrified “reverse” housing filtration took place. Neighborhoods had vertical ties to aspects of the macro system, particularly through political, economic, and organizational linkages (Warren, 1978). For example, as manufacturing wound down and firms relocated to cheaper points of production in the suburbs, rural “exurbs,” or to international locations with cheaper labor costs, inner-city plants were closed and often abandoned. Neigh- borhoods around them began to decline. Many insurance companies and banks not horizontally linked in the neighborhood’s interactional field habitually de- nied loans to home buyers and small entrepreneurs in many of these deteriorat- ing inner-city neighborhoods. Red lines were drawn on maps to identify communities in which investment was considered a bad risk. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 made this practice of redlining neighborhoods ille- gal, but it still persists, resulting in large pockets of urban decline.

Elizabeth A. Mulroy 85

Low-income residents who lived there had limited access to jobs that paid a living wage and thus no ability to save and move out to zones with better housing and living conditions. Absentee landlords, not horizontally linked in the com- munity’s interactional field, owned most multi-family housing and apartment buildings in declining inner-city neighborhoods as investments to make money. Rather than make needed repairs, they often let buildings run down and aban- doned them. Residents had no access to capital to purchase or improve the hous- ing in which they lived, or to start or improve a business. The impacts of the flow of capital out of these neighborhoods and the absence of vertical links for posi- tive community building purposes can be seen today in urban neighborhoods rife with rising poverty, failing schools, abandoned buildings, poor public ser- vices, and increased levels of crime (Richmond, 2000).

At the time these neighborhoods were in decline, highway construction pro- liferated from central business districts out to the sprawling new suburbs. Less expensive housing was built in rural areas far from central cities but near new super highways. This made it easier for commuters to get to work in the central cities but the highways cut through and divided the old working class inner-city neighborhoods in the process. Traffic congestion and air pollution increased as these new patterns of land use development were repeated across America.

The point of the gentrification example is to highlight how dynamic changes in a specific geographic community are driven by external forces that may work to decrease the strength of local horizontal ties as vertical ties to dis- tant but influential and powerful sources increase. Such vertical ties, however, may have negative or positive impacts on a target community as the gentrifica- tion example illustrates. While some vertical ties served to extract capital, oth- ers were used to infuse capital and improve neighborhood conditions.

This conceptualization helps the practitioner to monitor local community conditions in terms of the patterns of horizontal and vertical links. That analysis can then be related to: (1) the structure of the housing market relative to the availability of safe, habitable, and affordable housing, (2) location of public transit lines relative to employment for low-wage workers, (3) access to finan- cial capital (banks, credit unions), basic needs (groceries, pharmacy, clothing stores, health clinics, public schools), social capital (outreach offices for social services, family support centers), (4) physically safe and environmentally healthy places for children to play, and (5) culturally appropriate services for new immigrant groups.

Level 1–The Organization

Both macro level forces in Level 3 and the ways they are executed and imple- mented in Level 2, in turn, influence individual agencies. It is understood that many agencies are not community-oriented, but because their client groups may

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live in unhealthy and unsafe neighborhood environments, civic infrastructure is a matter for agency concern.

The model of Organization-in-Environment (Figure 1) makes the following three assumptions. First, the organization’s internal/external boundary is porous, so environmental surveillance and solution-finding are continuous and therefore strategic. Second, social workers need to be active community leaders at the deci- sion making table when complex coalitions are formed, issued framed and de- bated, tough political decisions made, and Solutions created (see arrows in Figure 1). Since an environment is dynamic, changes to agency structure, resource base, or functions can be anticipated not only from the organizational life cycle perspective (Hasenfeld & Schmid, 1989) but also from an ecological perspective as adapta- tions to the influences from Levels 3 and 2. Third, organizational behavior is guided by effectiveness, efficiency, and equity criteria. Effectiveness and effi- ciency are considered criteria for good internal management generally. Equity re- flects the social justice criteria and all three criteria need to be in balance as noted in Figure 1. Two theoretical perspectives are introduced next; namely, organiza- tional-environment relations and inter-organizational collaboration.

Organizational-Environment Relations. The relationship between formal or- ganizations and their external environments has interested a number of organi- zational sociologists and social work theorists for many years (Aldrich, 1979; Alter & Hague, 1993; Gummer, 1990; Hasenfeld, 1983; Lawrence & Lorsch, 1969; Schmid, 1992; 2000; Zald, 1970). Theorists once differentiated between a general environment of remote factors in the macro system and a task environ- ment of more immediate exchanges and negotiations (Hasenfeld, 1983). Schmid (2000) suggests that technological advance

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