Nicole P. Marwell

Marwell's research examines a range of questions about urban governance, with a focus on the diverse intersections between nonprofit organizations, government bureaucracies, communities, politics, and technology. 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. Cities, in this view, can be understood as complex and shifting sets of interorganizational relations.

She draws on an interdisciplinary set of insights and tools from sociology, organization studies, political science, public administration, and technology studies, and uses qualitative, quantitative, and historical methods to explore how changes at this meso-level of social structure affect urban cohesion, inequality, and exclusion.

Marwell's work on nonprofit organizations and urban governance has been published in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, City & Community, Social Service Review, Human Service Organizations, Qualitative Sociology, and the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. Her more recent work on internet innovation and equity has appeared in the proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), ACM CoNEXT, ACM SIGMETRICS, and the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (TPRC).

Her most recent book, Mismeasuring Impact: How Randomized Controlled Trials Threaten the Nonprofit Sector, was published in 2025 by Stanford University Press. Her previous book, Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City, was published in 2007 by the University of Chicago Press.

Prior to her academic career, Professor Marwell worked in nonprofits and philanthropy — including at 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, Academic Director of the Baruch Center for Nonprofit Strategy and Management, and a member of the Sociology faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center.