Joseph’s dissertation advances recent efforts by sociologists to better understand how organizations ultimately reproduce, or even generate, poverty. It focuses on homelessness, a particularly intractable manifestation of poverty in the United States, and nonprofits, key organizational actors in the American welfare landscape. The project conceives of nonprofits’ executive staff members as ‘supply-side’ actors and argues that understanding the worldviews that guide their programmatic decision making can help explain the durability of homelessness. The dissertation draws on several sources of qualitative data, including more than 150 interviews with nonprofit leaders and an original corpus of texts (mission statements, vision statements, value statements, timelines, and histories) from the public websites of hundreds of nonprofits.
Contact:
jwallerstein@g.harvard.edu
Scholar Website