Attributing Homelessness: The Contents, Patterning, and Power of Origin Stories in the Nonprofit Field

Abstract

To what do the leaders of nonprofit organizations attribute homelessness, and how do their attributions matter? Prior work has described nonprofits as tools of a state-sponsored homelessness management or production “system”; in doing so, it has taken for granted the potential for a single, macrolevel ideological project (often labeled “neoliberalism”) to organize an entire field, depriving the individuals who lead nonprofits of potentially varied beliefs, values, and capacities. Holding that leaders’ beliefs are essential “parts” of the system, this study pinpoints origin stories—the narratives nonprofits leaders tell about what causes homelessness—as distinguishing organizational characteristics. Through interviews and document analysis, I find that nonprofit leaders put forward two discrete narratives: the first, which I call the Network Causes Explanation (NCE), attributes homelessness to an absence or deterioration of social connection, while the second, which I call the Poverty Causes Explanation (PCE), attributes homelessness to an absence or loss of material wealth. The origin stories, beyond belying the notion of wholesale ideological and programmatic uniformity (or conformity) across the nonprofit homeless services arena, reveal two different reference points for homelessness, such that for some nonprofit leaders A=homelessness and for other leaders B=homelessness. Those reference points shape leaders’ administrative and programmatic decision making by moderating their interpretations of (i) what constitutes an acceptable status quo, (ii) what constitutes ‘local’ need, and (iii) what constitutes a sound evidence base for policy. I conclude the dissertation by discussing how the findings advance several sociological subfields, namely the sociology of organizations and the sociologies of homelessness and housing, and by considering some policy implications.