This volume makes a powerful case for the importance of organizations in urban sociology and the study of urban politics. Rejecting the dominant tendency to equate nonprofit or voluntary organizations primarily with membership, political socialization, or sociability, Nicole Marwell argues that formal organizations are more than sites for the formation of social capital. Formal organizations are also vehicles for projects that accumulate resources and potentially expand opportunities and political networks within poor communities. In a series of substantial chapters, each treating multiple organizations within a different neighborhood in Brooklyn, she demonstrates how organizational efforts are crucial for securing the external resources necessary to provide opportunities for housing, social services, and employment. Although the multisite design of the study was originally intended to speak to the determinants of “success” and “failure” in local economic development, the final chapter argues that the more striking conclusion concerns the similarities across organizations and neighborhoods within Brooklyn. Rather than shaping outcomes through their contributions to neighborhood-level moral order, these organizations are important as corporate actors engaged in field-level negotiations over political influence and economic resources.

Although Bargaining for Brooklyn is, in many respects, a new classic of urban sociology, it also makes a powerful contribution to our understanding of the articulation of local and national politics. By midcentury, these neighborhoods in Brooklyn had seen their glory days. Abandoned by “growth machine” politics that had been redirected to the suburbs and fragmented by the expressway projects championed by Robert Moses, once-vibrant urban communities deteriorated and contributed to the overall sense of the decline of New York City that would reach crisis proportions by the 1970s. The 1970s also brought an end to one experiment in the use of federal policy to revive neighborhoods, namely, the community action agencies that funneled federal funds to local projects while largely bypassing traditional political organizations. What was left was a bleak landscape of urban decay, marked by substantial poverty and rising rates of crime and drug use.

Yet by the time that Marwell began her fieldwork in two Brooklyn neighborhoods during the late 1990s, the establishment of a number of “community-based organizations” (CBOs) had transformed the social and political landscape. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, a series of initially grassroots efforts—tenants engaged in housing rehabilitation, neighbors seeking to shut down open-air drug markets—had produced a growing population of durable social service and nonprofit organizations. Initially, these organizations reestablished relationships with city government, particularly around the improvement (or, at least, slower deterioration) of housing stock. Because these programs and projects came to depend on federal funding as well as local voluntarism, the multiplying community-based organizations of Brooklyn developed as key nodes articulating local and national politics, public policy, and economic development. These capacities for community-centered mobilization took on greater importance as capital investors and real estate developers took new interest in these long-neglected neighborhoods and as New York City enjoyed a glittering resurgence at the turn of this century.

In a setting where diverse ethnic groups and class constituencies were fiercely competing for both real estate and public benefits, the capacity to sustain these linkages has proved mightily consequential for the distribution of rewards from urban redevelopment. Drawing on her rich ethnographic work, Marwell traces the competition between Latino and Hasidic organizations over access to space and capital for housing development. She documents variations in the linkages forged between constituents and social services, with some community-based organizations pursuing a “private politics of distribution” while others promote community empowerment through a “public goods politics” (p. 97), a strategy that in Brooklyn proved less capable of generating sustained political leverage. In contrast, the former generates a system of “triadic exchange” (p. 111) in which elected officials support contracts for community-based organizations that then provide jobs, preferential access, and services to voters and their families. The CBOs then become sites for the mobilization of gratitude and electoral support for politicians who have demonstrated their capacity to direct critical resources into the community. This, as Marwell argues, represents a significant new form of machine politics in which provision of public services and electoral support have become recoupled in significant ways. The consequences for individual economic outcomes have been equally significant inasmuch as the establishment of CBOs also generated employment for residents. In sum, the capacity of local activists to link grassroots efforts with city government and federal funding has had demonstrable consequences for the range of opportunities and obstacles confronting the urban poor.

Taken on its own terms, Bargaining for Brooklyn represents a significant reimagining of urban political sociology and the role of nonprofit organizations in urban politics. The argument is informed by a political and institutional sensibility that contrasts with the “moral order” emphasis of much of the literature on urban neighborhoods. Instead, Marwell is critically engaged with the theoretical premises of the tradition as a whole, arguing that the equation of geographical neighborhood with a socially cohesive community or moral order leads to a misrepresentation of key questions and phenomena. Similarly, equating neighborhood with a territorially delimited electoral district misses much of what is important about this form of urban politics. Her argument generates what might be characterized as a “political-institutional” reconstruction of urban sociology, one that attends to the role of organizations not simply as vessels for the formation of social ties but also as important corporate actors in multiple political contests that range far beyond the confines of any given neighborhood. As Marwell explains (p. 187):

By insisting on the central importance of organizations to the structuring of urban politics, Marwell highlights the inadequacy of any account that simply aggregates individual preferences or behaviors in order to explain either social problems or political outcomes. Much of what is creative, constructive, and contingent in politics lies at the intersection of locales and policies, of grassroots efforts and electoral politics. While Marwell's specific analysis illuminates the contemporary urban politics of economic development, this more basic theoretical point has much wider ramifications. Because politics is collective action, our assumptions about the nature of collectivity and social groups require careful and constant revisiting.