Nicole Marwell is Associate Professor in the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. She is also a faculty affiliate of the Department of Sociology, a faculty fellow at the Center for Spatial Data Science, and a member of the Faculty Advisory Council of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation. Her research examines urban governance, with a focus on the diverse intersections between nonprofit organizations, government bureaucracies, and politics.
Marwell’s approach to studying urban governance draws on an interdisciplinary set of insights and tools from sociology, organization studies, ethnic studies, political science, and public administration. She begins with the premise that organizations mediate the historically specific operation of key urban processes such as economic production, public goods distribution, community formation, and democratic representation. As such, organizations provide key sites for the empirical investigation of these and other urban phenomena. She understands cities as complex and shifting sets of inter-organizational relations, and uses qualitative, quantitative, and historical methods to explore how changes in this meso-level of social structure affect urban cohesion, inequality, and exclusion.
Her current research projects include:
(1) A study of how stakeholders understand the benefits and drawbacks of using randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate human service programs and organizations. This is joint research with SSA faculty Jennifer Mosley and Marci Ybarra, and supported by internal funding from the University of Chicago.
(2) An investigation of how different forms of knowledge are deployed in decision-making during the rollout of mandates for evidence-based policy take-up by human service organizations. This is a collaboration with colleagues at the University of Washington, the University of Minnesota, the University of Indiana, and SSA.
(3) The development of a course and book prospectus examining the new governance challenges posed by the 21st century data explosion, with a focus on how data science, social science, and public policy intersect. Supported by a grant from the Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN), this project is a collaboration with Christopher Berry of the Harris School of Public Policy.
(4) The Next-Generation Health and Human Services Platform, a project that seeks to develop a process and platform to use publicly available data to present a system-wide picture of whether public funds are appropriately matched to identified community health and human service needs. Conducted in collaboration with Julia Koschinsky at the University of Chicago Center for Spatial Data Science, this project was supported by a grant from the Public Health National Center for Innovation, a grant program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Marwell has published articles in the American Sociological Review, Annals of the American Association of Political and Social Sciences, City and Community, Social Service Review, Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership and Governance, Qualitative Sociology, and the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. Her 2007 book, Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City was published by the University of Chicago Press. Prior to beginning her academic career, Professor Marwell worked in the field of nonprofits and philanthropy, including New York City’s Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the AT&T Foundation, the Levi Strauss Foundation, and Nike.
She was previously an Associate Professor of Public Affairs at Baruch College, the Academic Director of the Baruch Center for Nonprofit Strategy and Management, and a member of the Sociology faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Professor Marwell received her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago.
