Abstract
The recent “inhabited institutions” research stream in organizational theory reinvigorates new institutionalism by arguing that organizations are not merely the instantiation of environmental, institutional logics “out there,” where organizational actors seamlessly enact preconscious scripts, but are places where people and groups make sense of, and interpret, institutional vocabularies of motive. This article advances the inhabited institutions approach through an inductive case study of a transitional housing organization called Parents Community. This organization, like other supportive direct service organizations, exists in an external environment relying increasingly on federal funding. Most scholars studying this sector argue that as federal monies expand to pay for these organizations’ services, non-profit organizations will be forced to become ever more bureaucratic and rationalized. However, I find that three key service departments at Parents Community respond in multiple ways to this external environment, depending on each department members’ creative uses of institutional logics and local meanings, which emerge from their professional commitments, personal interests, and interactional, on-the-ground decision making. By looking carefully at these three departments’ variable responses to the external environment, we have a better map for seeing how human agency is integrated into organizational dynamics for this and other organizations.
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Notes
The names used in this article for the facility, its departments, and staff are pseudonyms.
Family sponsors help residents secure TANF, SSI, food stamps, child care subsidies, and subsequent subsidized housing slots.
The interviews covered a range of topics, depending on the interviewee’s role in the organization. When I interviewed staff, management, and volunteer instructors—the main data sources for this paper—I asked general questions about their roles and responsibilities within the organization, their educational and work backgrounds, their contacts and obligations to outside funding sources, their work with other social service agencies and organizations (state and non-state), as well as their more philosophical views on working in the supportive direct services sector. I coded and analyzed the qualitative data using ATLAS.ti.
Family sponsors encounter the competing models of their profession in all the usual places that new institutional scholars write about: school, professional associations, and in their ongoing interactions with others in the field. This is a more thoroughly professionalized—institutionalized—subunit than those found in either the Discovery Center or the Housing department. Composed of three family sponsors and a director, each of the professional staff members of the Family Support department are steeped in the logics of the profession. The director of the department has a masters degree in social work and an additional credential to provide mental health therapy, and she serves on a variety of boards in the mental health field. Two of her three professional staff also have advanced degrees (one in education, the other in social work), and all three participate in work-related associations outside Parents Community. All professional staff in the department use the language of the profession fluently.
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Acknowledgments
I want to acknowledge Mary Blair-Loy, Gary Alan Fine, Carol Heimer, Debra Minkoff, Barry O’Neill, Evan Schofer, Van Schoales, Mitchell Stevens, Marc Ventresca, and the Theory and Society reviewers for their many helpful comments on this article and previous drafts. The Russell Sage Foundation staff—particularly Sarah Lowe, Nicole Radmore, and Katie Winograd—provided valuable research and library assistance during my 2006–2007 fellowship in New York. I reserve my most heartfelt thanks for the residents, alumni, staff, management, and volunteers at Parents Community, whose real names do not appear here, but whose contributions to this project were many.
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Binder, A. For love and money: Organizations’ creative responses to multiple environmental logics. Theor Soc 36, 547–571 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9045-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9045-x