Prosocial Organizing and the Distance between Core and Community Work

Abstract

Research on prosocial organizing has made great strides in understanding how organizations foster durable social change through core work directly targeting specific beneficiaries (e.g. work integration), and also through community work to obtain the cooperation of key stakeholders. Yet, extant research tends to focus on community work that is closely related – or proximal – to core work and is thus weakly equipped to explain how seemingly unrelated, distal community work unfolds. To address this puzzle, we study an Italian work integration social enterprise that engaged in anti-Mafia work to support its core work of reintegrating people with mental health issues. We unveiled the process whereby it came to engage in this distal community work, how this work facilitated the destigmatization of the beneficiaries and, ultimately, their reintegration in the community. We contribute to the literature on prosocial organizing by providing a more complex and nuanced view of the relationship between core and community work, as well as how to manage stigma.