Local organization for the provision of health services is indicative of and closely related to the urban locality's broader characteristics and may be viewed in interorganizational terms. These considerations guided this comparative study which attempts to specify the association between organization prestige and the allocation of support to organizations among 126 of the largest U. S. cities. The more unfragmented and free of organizational turbulence the city, the more positive the expected association. The degree of positive correlation between prestige and capital varied directly with the presence of consensus-based government, low diversity among export establishments within the economy, and little recent population increase. Such correlation varied inversely with only one main measure of community coherence, the presence of community-wide associations. Structural elitism may provide an additional condition for prestige-based organization support. The findings not only have implications for the sociologies of organizations, health, and the community but also for more general theories of social stratification.
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