From Suites to Streets: Professional Expertise and the Organizational Pursuit of Social and Systemic Integration

Sociologists have shown that organizations shape urban integration, but prior studies have not revealed how organizational characteristics—particularly different forms of expertise—influence the pursuit of integration. To understand how expertise affects integrative practices and funding, we distinguish social integration—creating ties among constituents—from systemic integration—connecting constituents to institutional resources. Combining administrative, survey, interview, and ethnographic data on nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area, we find that the institutional rewards of suite-level expertise are substantial but temporally contingent, while the link between integrative practices and funding is durable. Contrary to expectations, many organizations resist professionalization to pursue social integration through street-level expertise or combine both forms through tooling up. Bridging organizational and urban sociology, we challenge the assumption that nonprofits uniformly foster integration, offering new insight into how organizations navigate an evolving ecology of expertise.