Friday, March 28, 2025 | 6pm to 7:30pm
25 West 43rd Street, 10th Floor, Room 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan
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How does racism influence the formation and development of organizational life in a racialized community? In this paper, Prof. Simon Yamawaki Shachter extends on Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness to explain community organizations’ roles and development. Combined with the concepts of oppositional consciousness from social movements and decoupling from organization theory, Prof. Yamawaki Shachter builds a processual model of organizational life for racialized communities. He shows how the model explains the development of 19th and early 20th century Chinese organizations in the U.S., and describes how the community formed an incomparably large, sophisticated, interconnected, and politically-active organizational field at such an early point in U.S. history. The organizations that developed—based in historical Chinese migrant organizations that responded to anti-Chinese racism—looked different from past and contemporary Chinese or U.S.-based organizational fields. This case and theoretical model show the types of organizations and stages of development for the organizational life of communities that face racism.
Author Bio
Simon Yamawaki Shachter is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. His research analyzes how the interrelationships between civil society and the state perpetuate and/or alleviate inequality. He takes organizational- and race-based perspectives to understand how people, historically and today, seek to influence policy and politics. He has studied these topics in the varied areas of international development, party machines, biomedical research, immigration policy, veteran’s benefits, and policing. His work has been published in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Studies in American Political Development, and Voluntas. He is a mixed methods researcher using archival, computational, and quantitative methods to find field-level patterns in organizational demography and institutionalized behavior.
He is currently undertaking a major research project on the interpenetration of immigrant organizations and urban politics during the 19th-century creation of cities on the West Coast of the U.S. This was a site where racism and ethnic community organizations played central roles in defining the boundaries among racial and ethnic groups, developing the political institutions of the states and cities, creating cultures of place, and leaving enduring legacies on the organization of civil society.
He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago, and a B.S. in computer science from Stanford University. He is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area where he has been deeply involved in nonprofit organizations that promote community engagement.
