Abstract
Organizational life is patterned by shared meanings and practices known as “institutional logics.” Often, multiple logics exist within the same organization in a potentially tense state of “institutional complexity.” Extensive research examines how organizational elites and professionals (i.e., “experts”) manage this complexity by replacing, combining, or segregating contradictory logics. However, experts sometimes manage complexity tacitly, which obscures tensions between logics. This paper, drawing on an ethnographic study of an anti-gender-based violence organization, theorizes inexperience as a lens through which tensions become visible. Analysis of the data reveals that novice victim advocates noticed conflicts between directives to both empower and safeguard victims, practices originating from professional social work and bureaucratic state logics, respectively. In contrast, expert volunteers and staff members tacitly combined these competing logics by empowering victims to safeguard themselves. For organizational scholars, these data show how novices bring attention to contradictions that experts take for granted.
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Like many social-change-turned-social-service organizations, anti-gender-based violence (GBV) organizations are rife with tensions. The anti-GBV movement, which began as a loose collective of grassroots, volunteer-led efforts in the late 1960s, coalesced over the 1970s and 1980s into a highly professionalized network of formal organizations, such as rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, and other trauma recovery centers (Echols 1989; Ferree and Martin 1995). Despite immense transformations, however, professionalization, which incorporates both expert personnel like grant writers and social workers as well as the adoption of new values and practices (Hwang and Powell 2009), is incomplete. Feminist-identified activists still inhabit anti-GBV organizations and pursue social change goals alongside, or in lieu of, professional service provision goals (Markowitz and Tice 2002; Sweet 2021; Zilber 2002). This coming-together of diverse and sometimes contradictory meanings and practices leads, at times, to conflict.
Anti-GBV organizations present a typical case of “institutional complexity,” or the presence of multiple "logics" (Thornton et al. 2012). Over the past fifty years, neo-institutionalists within organization studies, management, and sociology have worked to understand how organizational behavior stems not from rational assessments of effectiveness and efficiency but from dominant, field-level meanings (values, goals, beliefs, norms) and their associated practices (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977). Often, however, organizations rest at the intersection of multiple fields, or symbolic spaces occupied by related organizations pursuing shared ends, and thus are exposed to multiple systems of meanings and practices (Battilana and Dorado 2010). While sometimes these multiple logics are compatible (Mair and Hehenberger 2014), they often contradict one another (Besharov and Smith 2014; Pache and Santos 2013). Because such contradictions can produce negative outcomes like workers quitting, stakeholders disengaging, and resources drying up, organizations and their elite and professional (referred to collectively here as “experts”) inhabitants develop strategies for managing them (Greenwood et al. 2011; Jarzabkowski et al. 2013; Kraatz et al. 2008). Contradictory goals are pursued at different times or in different places; workers whose values clash are kept apart; or competing meanings and practices are combined to create something new.
Extensive research documents diverse practices for managing complexity across contexts (Lounsbury et al. 2021). However, this paper revives early ethnomethodological insights to suggest that the practice is often so ingrained, habituated, or obvious that justifications for it are hard to see (Garfinkel 1967/1991). Disruptive events like holidays, legislative changes, or new technologies can reveal why competing logics are incompatible, and therefore the relative importance of logics’ constitutive elements, but disruptions are uncommon in organizational life (Sadeh and Zilber 2019; Toubiana and Zietsma 2017). Building on three years of ethnographic data from an anti-GBV organization, and 40 interviews with volunteer and staff victim advocates, this paper argues that novices render the contradictions—that experts tacitly manage—visible. Data reveal that new volunteer advocates struggled to manage paradoxical directives to both empower and safeguard victims of sexual and domestic violence, a paradox which experienced volunteer and staff advocates managed without much thought. By showing that a focus on novices elucidates contradictions that experts may take for granted, this paper identifies a new strategy for organizational scholars to map the contours of logics.
Institutional Complexity and Its Management
Though organizational theorists have long recognized that organizations often pursue contradictory goals, engage in inconsistent practices, and comply with competing stakeholder demands (Barnard 1968 [1938]; Hargrave and Van de Ven 2017; Taylor 1911), the study of such complexity cohered under the theoretical umbrella of new institutionalism. Neo-institutionalists—scholars interested in how macro-level rules, norms, and cultures, not individual rationality, shape organizational behavior (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977; Scott 2013)—use the language of “institutional logics” to describe clusters of meanings and practices consistently found in organizations within a given field (Friedland and Alford 1991; Thornton et al. 2012).Footnote 1 Scholars first identified stable logics within fields, or symbolic spaces inhabited by organizations that recognized one another and were oriented towards similar goals (Scott 2013), then tracked how logics dominant in particular fields would change over time. For example, at the turn of the twentieth century, social welfare provision shifted from a poorhouse logic—which sorted the needy into categories of varying degrees of deservingness, and institutionalized or materially supported them accordingly—to a semi-welfare state logic under which the needy were more consistently subjected to transformative services meant to empower their escape from destitution (Mohr and Duquenne 1997). Extensive research tracks the processes through which one logic supplants another (Rao et al. 2003; Thornton 2002; Thornton and Ocasio 1999).
Quickly, however, neo-institutionalists noted that organizations often rest at the nexus of multiple fields and thus must navigate multiple logics. Hospitals, for example, face competing demands from patients who want all needs met; market competitors that drive hospitals to eschew inefficient procedures and burdensome patients; regulators that demand hospitals’ costly reliability and accountability; and providers’ professional ethical commitments (D’Aunno et al. 2000; Scott et al. 2000). While such complexity can produce innovation (Lounsbury and Crumley 2007), very often it leads to conflict, as adherents to divergent logics butt heads over what their organization’s values, goals, and practices should be (Kraatz et al. 2008). Law enforcement agencies, for example, in balancing professional, civic, and state logics, often require officers to engage in practices that distract from, or even detract from, their purported goal of ensuring public safety. For street-level officers, expectations that they meet arrest quotas or uphold sit-lie ordinances that criminalize homelessness—practices rooted in state logics of accountability or civic logics of shared public space—do little to keep the public safe (Moskos 2009; Stuart 2016). Importantly, paradoxes leave officers frustrated and communities feeling overpoliced and underprotected, thereby endangering law enforcement agencies’ effectiveness.
Given the consequences of institutional complexity—both positive and negative—extensive research reveals strategies that organizations and their professional and elite inhabitants deploy for managing it (Besharov and Smith 2014; Greenwood et al. 2011; Jarzabkowski et al. 2013). Perhaps the cleanest response to complexity is siloing, or the confinement of competing logics to distinct temporal and spatial locations (Binder 2007; Mair and Hehenberger 2014). Financial services firms, for example, often keep their management consulting and auditing arms separate (Crockett et al. 2004). While keeping both services in house reduces friction for clients (and maximizes firms’ profits), each adheres to a distinct, and often-contradictory logic—consultants are profit-oriented whereas auditors are beholden to regulators. To maintain both services without endangering either, firms construct barriers to prevent information and culture-sharing between them. Such accounts, however, sometimes overemphasize organization-level fixes while leaving underexplored the innovative strategies developed for managing complexity developed by the people occupying organizations.
As scholars increasingly bring “people back in” —advancing, for example, inhabited institutional (Hallett and Ventresca 2006) and institutional entrepreneurship (Garud et al. 2007) approaches—more examples emerge of strategies that people within organizations deploy to manage complexity. In many “hybrid organizations” which host multiple logics (Battilana and Dorado 2010), organizational inhabitants creatively wield, in a move akin to Swidler’s (1986) theory of cultural toolkits, elements of competing logics rather than trying to keep them separate. This “institutional bricolage,” or creative combination of elements from multiple logics (Christiansen and Lounsbury 2013), can both manage paradox and spur innovation (Boxenbaum and Battilana 2005; Pache and Santos 2013). For example, social enterprises combine business and charity logics to construct new organizational identities that conceptualize profit as a means to accomplishing social good (Battilana and Lee 2014; Hwang and Powell 2009; Smith and Besharov 2019). Though workers’ commitment to competing logics is sometimes a “trojan horse” veneer (Binder 2007; Pache and Santos 2013), at other moments they do combine elements creatively to create new cultures, rules, or practices that satisfy diverse needs (Battilana and Dorado 2010; Farjoun 2010).
The Taken-for-Grantedness of Instituional Complexity’s Management
This attention to how individuals at the micro-level transform, decompose, combine, and discard macro-level institutions in pursuit of individual or organizational goals is referred to as the “practice turn” in institutional theory (Jarzabkowski et al. 2007; Lawrence et al. 2013; Smets et al. 2017). Scholars associated with the practice turn to a greater extent on ethnographic and other qualitative, interpretive methods and focus on interactions as its central unit of analysis. This reveals many neo-institutionalists’ intellectual kinship with ethnomethodology (Thornton et al. 2012; Zilber 2020), or the study of how social meaning is produced through interaction.
An ethnomethodological insight elevated by early neo-institutionalists is the taken-for-grantedness of dominant meanings and practices. Citing Goffman (1981) [1967], Meyer and Rowan (1977) argue that practices remain institutionalized at the field level despite their technical invalidity due to ceremonial avoidance, discretion, and overlooking. People, in taking their daily routines and assumptions for granted, make them appear inevitable or natural (Garfinkel 1991 [1967]). For example, corporations ceremonially partake in diversity programs like targeted recruitment and bias trainings even though they do little to increase racial representation (Dobbin 2009). Moreover, in tacitly implementing ineffective and selective diversity programs, organizations reproduce both the realness of racial categories and the racial inferiority of Latino and Black people in the USA (Ray 2019).
While this taken-for-grantedness is perhaps more apparent during periods of stability, the institutional work people do to navigate institutional complexity may also be tacit. Goffman, for example, developed his theory of “footing” to understand how people use linguistic and non-linguistic resources—language, tone, bodily comportment—to make sense of and lend meaning to interactions (1981). As people move between settings, they realign themselves, or shift their footing, by adopting new linguistic or non-linguistic resources. Research on doctor-patient consultations, for example, shows that doctors minimize debate and dominate speech around recommendations whereas patients talk only while describing symptoms and deferring to doctors’ discussions of next steps (Ariss 2009; Gill 1998). In so doing, each contributes to broader social understandings of doctors as medical experts. Those very same participants may have to realign themselves across settings, however, as doctors, for example, interview for new jobs and defer to interviewers’ expectations (Campbell and Roberts 2007), or as patients go home and project managerial authority over their children (Kendall 2006).
Changes in footing are often taken-for-granted. This is not to say, of course, that people innately “know” which linguistic and non-linguistic resources to use across settings, but rather that this knowledge is so deeply ingrained, so obvious, or so long ago learned so as to appear natural. Linguists note that tacit expectations about the appropriateness of various forms of talk and bodily comportments are made visible when people make errors (Hutchby 1999). This observation echoes earlier ethnomethodological work on “breaching,” or the intentional breaking of social norms so as to expose them as real (Garfinkel 1967/1991).
This tacitness, and the importance of breaching for rendering it visible, is true of the management of institutional complexity as well. Logics are often so ingrained, habituated, and routinized that, though people on the ground are, of course, thinking about their engagement with multiple sets of rules, or competing practice directives, or contradictory norms, giving voice to that cognition is challenging (Hallett and Hawbaker 2021). While organizational inhabitants can discuss their intentions, intentions vary over time and across place (Child et al. 2007) and leave uncaptured the constraints on behavior people themselves cannot see (Battilana et al. 2009; DiMaggio 1997). Disruptive events, as when teachers must grapple with new rules that are incompatible with their established practices (Hallett 2010) or when a lethal chemical spill forces the chemical industry to confront contradictions between environmental and market logics (Hoffman 1999), render cognition visible.
Disruptions, however, are generally acute events rather than everyday features of organizational life. To see why care logics and research conflicts are incompatible in a nonprofit organization devoted to advocacy around a degenerative disease, scholars must wait for the discovery of a novel medical intervention (Toubiana and Zietsma 2017). To understand tensions between ethno-nationalist logics and logics of universalism in an Israeli pro-peace organization, scholars must wait for the annual Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers of Israel and Victims of Terrorism (Sadeh and Zilber 2019). While in both cases multiple logics can be observed all the time, on what grounds, exactly, tensions compete bubbles to the surface during periods of disruption. In this paper, I advance the study of novices—people new to an organization and the organization’s broader field—as a way to observe tiny disruptions in everyday life. Institutional research reveals that logic management is a learned skill (Everitt 2012; Weiss 2021). Focusing on organizational inhabitants who have not yet learned the skill, and thus are in a state of confusion, blunder, or awkwardness and they confront complexity on a daily basis, reveals what, exactly, about logics makes them incompatible. This approach supports the study of logics as phenomenon as it renders visible points of cohesion and durability as well as tension (Lounsbury et al. 2021).
Institutional Complexity in the Anti-Gender-Based Violence Movement
While resistance to GBV has existed for centuries (Deer 2015; Omolade 1995), it first formalized into a social movement in the 1960s. Early feminist activists, through consciousness-raising groups during which women were asked to reflect on their experiences as women with relationships, school, work, and the state, came to see their experiences with violence not as individual issues but as social problems (Allen 1973; Davis 1983; Tierney 1982). Activists resisted professional knowledge of the time, particularly medical and psychological knowledge, which pathologized victims for supposedly inviting violence (Brownmiller 1993 [1975]; Hartsock 1983; Sweet 2021). Instead, activists developed their own care networks based on new systems of knowledge that centered their lived experiences and resulting understandings of violence. Women volunteers staffed hotlines, provided legal advice, and opened early women’s shelters (Dobash and Dobash 1992; Ferree and Hess 2000; Schechter 1982).
Along with their informal care networks, activists also lobbied the state to increase its attention to GBV (Echols 1989; Lehrner and Allen 2009). Activists demanded the police enforce domestic violence laws on the books and called for an expansion of sexual violence laws. They also called for more social services for victims of violence. In large part, activists succeeded (Corrigan 2013; Martin 2005; Mulla 2014). Criminal-legal attention to GBV has increased massively in the USA, and service organizations that were formerly funded and staffed at a grassroots level have since formalized into nonprofits. Along with this professionalization, however, has come new forms of expertise (Sweet 2021; Zilber 2002). To secure funding, nonprofits have increasingly hired staff members, like social workers and psychologists, whose medicalized expertise is seen as legitimate by the state (Markowitz and Tice 2002; Messner et al. 2015).
The transformation from activist to professional expertise was not total, however, and diverse understandings of and responses to violence persist. For example, nonprofits remain feminist-identified and continue to conceptualize violence as the product of a patriarchal gender order (Arnold and Ake 2013). They also maintain feminist practices like consciousness-raising groups and speak-outs that privilege the lived experiences of victims themselves over professionals (Findler 2022; Kelland 2016; Westmarland and Alderson 2013). At the same time, services provided are increasingly rooted in the language of trauma which privileges social workers’, psychologists’, and public health professionals’ expertise (Greenberg 2019; Sweet 2021).
Methods
I spent three years volunteering for and conducting ethnographic observation at the Center for Healthy Futures (CHF), an anti-GBV organization in the westernmost USA. Like similar organizations, CHF serves victims of many forms of GBV, including sexual violence—a term under which falls harassment, assault, abuse, and rape—domestic abuse, and stalking. Advocates at CHF refer to their organization varyingly as a rape crisis center, a domestic violence organization, a violence prevention organization, and a trauma recovery center. I refer to it here as an anti-GBV organization in order to capture the diversity of its clientele and services.
CHF provides a slate of services similar to other Rape Crisis Centers (RCC) across the USA and around the world (Ferree and Martin 1995; Markowitz and Tice 2002; Zilber 2002). Volunteer and staff advocates work a 24-h hotline, on which they provide crisis counseling and make referrals to resources. They also provide in-person advocacy for victims reporting to police stations and forensic medical exam centers. For longer-term clients, staff advocates provide group and individual counseling, and casework which includes court accompaniments, legal support, assistance with finding jobs and housing, and more. Beyond these intervention services meant to address violence after it has occurred, the organization also engages in preventative efforts. Through youth clubs and trainings in schools, workplaces, and community groups, CHF’s volunteer and staff advocates hope to disrupt cycles of violence and produce “healthy futures.”
I participated in both intervention and prevention programs during my three years at CHF. Though I sometimes covered other advocates’ hotline shifts, I primarily volunteered on the Domestic Violence Response Team (DVRT), a collaboration between law enforcement officers and victim advocates. During my weekly DVRT shifts, I staffed three police stations where I provided advocacy—information on the criminal-legal process and victims’ rights, along with direct intervention with law enforcement when necessary—and assisted domestic violence victims with restraining orders and service access. In addition to my intervention work, I also conducted prevention trainings at schools and community groups.
Advocacy is quite solitary. I took hotline shifts from my home and provided most in-person crisis intervention and prevention education alone. To get a better sense of organizational life at CHF, then, I assisted with trainings for new volunteers as a “coach,” attended staff and volunteer meetings including a monthly in-service, and went to social events including fundraisers, volunteer recognitions, and holiday parties. This time at CHF was also important because, though my volunteering endeared me to CHF staff and volunteers and provided me with embodied knowledge of the joys and challenges of victim advocacy, my direct interactions with victims do not appear in my data. I made this decision, alongside leaders at CHF, to ensure no victims were discouraged from receiving care by my status as a researcher. Lastly, while the bulk of my data come from ethnographic notes written during observation—jottings on paper or in my phone while in the field, then later extended into fieldnotes—I also conducted 40 in-depth interviews with volunteer and staff advocates towards the end of my time with the organization.
My analysis of the data was informed by the extended case method (Burawoy 1998; Eliasoph and Lichterman 1999). Interested in the anti-GBV movement’s turn towards professional social work practice and partnerships with the state, I looked for evidence of each logic in the data—their emergence, uptake, and consequences—and for their relationship with other logics. From this targeted review of the data, I identified the simultaneous emphasis on practices of empowerment and safety and variation in advocates’ responses to them. I then returned iteratively to the literature to both makes sense of these paradoxical policies as a case of institutional complexity and to extend the literature by theorizing variation in advocates’ responses to paradox.
Results
In the following section, I first present two competing logics—the professional social work logic and the bureaucratic state logic. The professional logic centers clients’ self-directed improvement through the practice of empowerment. This required CHF advocates to, as one training document outlined, “follow the caller’s lead.” The state logic, on the other hand, centers consistent, legally compliant, and well-documented care. Legal compliance at CHF required that advocates ensure victims’ safety by assessing their risk and acting if they believe victims to be in immediate physical danger. After mapping these two complete logics, I then show that two of the practices core to each logic—empowerment and safety—rather than the logics’ organizing beliefs or goals, caused confusion among advocates. How could CHF advocates, for example, both empower victims to make their own decisions and direct victims to call 911?
I illustrate, however, that not all advocates were equally confused. Rather, novice advocates expressed deep uncertainty about how to simultaneously empower and safeguard victims and often ended up practicing only empowerment or safety. Conversely, expert advocates, including experienced volunteers and staff members, comfortably practiced both at the same time. That experts took their simultaneous practice of empowerment and safety for granted—an achievement that alluded many novices—reveals how much contradiction is missed when focusing only on experts. In shifting our focus to novices’ early grappling with their organizations’ multiple logics we can “see” which elements of logics cohered and which competed.
The Professional Social Work Logic: “Survivors Are Their Own Healers”
Since the late nineteenth century, the nascent profession of social work, and the field of social welfare provision more broadly, has embraced what today we might call an “empowerment model” of practice. Whereas earlier eras of service provision worked only to satisfy some deserving populations’ immediate needs, progressive-era social workers castigated government handouts as counterproductive (Mohr and Duquenne 1997). They, instead, advocated for changes both in the poor’s environments and cultures to ensure they had the capacity to pull themselves out of poverty (Orloff and Skocpol 1984; Simon 1994). Early empowerment compelled the poor to adopt white, middle-class patterns of behavior (Addams 1910/1990). Over the course of the twentieth century, however, postcolonial and feminist theorists challenged this early elevation of expert perspectives, arguing that they center masculinist knowledge stemming from the Global North. Instead, these theorists advanced an epistemology that centers the knowledge of the marginalized themselves (Collins 2002; Freire 1970; Hartsock 1983). In the context of professional practice, this means unearthing and affirming clients’ knowledge about how best to improve their own circumstances (Westmarland and Alderson 2013). The professional social work logic occupied a privileged position at CHF, an organization staffed and trained by many social workers and psychologists. Marta, a staff member at CHF, introduced novice advocates to the empowerment model during their first day of training.
We follow an empowerment model. We don’t tell people what to do. We provide options and tools for the survivor and leave the decisions up to them with our support and help. We need to provide resources, but most importantly, we need to empower survivors.
Here, Marta described the practice of empowerment. For adherents to a professional social work logic, to empower meant to provide information but trust clients to draw on their own knowledge to make decisions that are best for them. The practice of empowerment, as just one component of a broader logic, was propelled by patterned beliefs and goals. Training coordinator Elisa, for example, explained for advocates why the empowerment model was important.
We’re not heroes. I know some of you are superheroes because you’re here already, but that’s not what we do. We don’t want to rescue a survivor, especially in a situation where their power was already taken away. I know you have positive intentions, but we want to make sure we give survivors as much power as possible.
The empowerment model, then, was best practice because it supported victims’ reclamation of their agency. It was also best practice, as discussed below by Serena, an emergency services coordinator, because victims’ knowledge was more useful than advocates’. Serena began her presentation on “safety planning” with a discussion question.
Serena: Why should survivors come up with safety plans?
Volunteer: To give them control over their future.
Serena: Yes, exactly, but also because they know their perpetrator better than we do. They know how to best avoid their abuser.
As Serena made it clear, empowering victims to make their own decisions was best practice not only because it restored their agency, but also because they intrinsically knew, due to their lived experiences, how best to respond to violence. The job of the advocate, then, was to ask questions in order to excavate and uplift knowledge from victims that was already there. As Hope, CHF’s director of counseling, told volunteers, their role was to ask victims “‘How do you get safe?’, not to tell survivors to leave their relationships. We do not give advice.” In a training, Marta, a staff member, drove this point home.
We want to give power back to survivors. Our role is to build their self-confidence by following their lead. If they want resources for their abuser, we get them those resources. You can ask if they want options, but it’s their call. Can’t force them to leave abuser, go to shelter, or anything.
CHF members were to empower victims by providing them with a slate of options, if victims asked for them, then supporting whatever decision they made.
Survivors are their own healers. We are simply the guides. We ask them questions in order to help them figure out what’s best for them. We never presume to know what’s best for the survivor, never know the answer. Instead, we use questioning to help guide them to their own best answer. We never tell people what to do.
The practice of empowerment constituted, along with belief in victims’ knowledge and commitment to victims’ self-determination, a professional social work logic. From their first day of training, volunteers were instructed in the rationale for empowerment—it restored agency that violence stifled and centered victims’ superior knowledge—and in empowerment’s implementation—Socratic questioning and the provision of, if asked, diverse options. However, empowerment was not the only clear and consistent logic guiding advocates’ behavior at CHF.
The Bureaucratic State Logic: “Safety Should Be Number One”
The professional logic stood in contrast with the bureaucratic state logic, of which the practice of safety is a part. Friedland and Alford (1991) recognize the bureaucratic state as one of the USA’s core institutions. The bureaucratic state logic, as opposed to the democratic or authoritarian, for example, derives legitimacy from its legality, consistency, objectivity, and appropriateness (Meyer et al. 2014, 866). Outcomes themselves are not necessarily as important as the processes—legal and rules-based—through which they are achieved. CHF staff members thought often about their legal responsibilities as a state contract recipient. During a monthly in-service meeting for volunteers, for example, staff members Adriana and Jovi provided volunteer advocates with a refresher on “blue sheets.” These intake forms detailed victims’ experiences with violence and the crisis intervention services delivered by advocates.
Adriana: It’s very important to fill everything out because these can be subpoenaed.
Jovi: We had a survivor actually pass away recently, and her abuser’s name wasn’t on the blue sheet. We’re stressing a bit right now because of some of the information that was missed.
Here, Adriana and Jovi disclosed their concern that CHF had fallen out of legal compliance—and thus had failed in its adherence to the state logic—because an advocate did not practice safety. Though actual failures in legal compliance were rare (or at least failures that grabbed the attention of the state), CHF staff members did frequently emphasize the practice of safety, or assessing risk and taking action to ensure victims’ physical safety. In so doing, staff members highlighted safety’s centrality to a bureaucratic state logic at CHF. In a training for novice volunteer advocates, Jovi drew on the same example of a victim’s death to demonstrate how the practice of safety ensured CHF’s legal compliance.
While taking our shifts, we are also responsible for filling out paperwork. By filling out paperwork promptly and ensuring that we offer follow-ups within our 72-hour window, we maintain CHF’s professional image. At no point should survivors feel as though we’re disorganized. Paperwork is also important for documentation. I don’t like to use this example, but sometimes we lose survivors. We lost one a few months ago. [The police] has launched an investigation, so they’re asking CHF for all their records of contact of the client, from the very first time the survivor spoke to CHF. The organization has to make sure that it crosses all its Ts and dots all of its Is.
CHF’s advocates, of course, wanted their clients to live for many reasons, the least important of which was because of the bureaucratic headache a death created for the organization. However, as Jovi illustrated above, adherence to state-mandated safety practices—like checking in with victims within three days of their original hotline call and competing paperwork which requires documentation of the seriousness of abuse and presence of certain red flags like strangulation—aided in the normative pursuit of legal compliance. To ensure their organization’s compliance with their responsibilities as a formal state partner, CHF staff members trained novice advocates in the practice of safety. While training novice advocates in hotline procedures, Marta emphasized the importance of assessing safety at the beginning of every call.
Safety should be number one with domestic violence survivors. That’s why on hotline we always ask if they’re in a safe place to talk. Also ask, “Are you hurt in any way?” Assess if they need medical attention. It’s also important for us to realize that survivors don’t need rescuing, okay? Our role is not to rescue. We treat people with dignity and respect.
Here, though Marta makes clear that advocates’ duty was to assess victims’ safety, she maintained her commitment to a professional logic and the practice of empowerment. Though advocates should ensure victims are safe, they should not disempower them by directing action. At many other moments, however, CHF staff members—including Marta—instructed novice advocates to disregard the practice of empowerment in favor of the practice of safety. Consider, for example, Marta’s explanation of the difference between “choking,” which describes a foreign object caught in the throat, and “strangulation,” which is an intentional act, during a training on domestic violence.
The proper term is strangulation. Pay attention to petechiae. They’re broken blood vessels from strangulation. It will appear in and around the eyes, or on the lips. It’s important to notice if someone has been strangled because that is a much higher crime than just domestic violence. Other symptoms could be a hoarse voice. If we hear a raspy voice on the phone, make sure they haven’t been strangled. If they have been strangled, have them hang up and call 911. This is very dangerous, especially if they passed out from the strangulation. It could have permanent damage.
Marta’s instruction to have them hang up and call 911 centered the state logic—the practice of safety justified by CHF’s objective, legal responsibilities—over the professional logic and its associated empowerment practice. When advocates heard signs, they believed to be reflective of strangulation, they were to “have” victims take immediate action, regardless of victims’ own feelings about their needs or level of risk. This explicit advancement of the state logic at the expense of the professional was not an isolated incident. During a monthly in-service meeting, excerpted below, Megan, a current member of CHF’s counseling staff and former volunteer coach, presented on the relationship between GBV and disordered eating.
Megan: If you’re talking to a survivor who tells you they’ve been throwing up three times a day, every day, and they look sick, ask, “how do you feel about going to the emergency room? You could literally die. Especially with purging, when you throw up a lot there’s an electrolyte imbalance, and you could die right away. Heart attack, heart failure…”
Adriana: [Raising her hand] That might make someone who’s experienced trauma feel worse—like, you can’t even do that [purge] right.
Megan: I was exaggerating a bit. But I would just say, “I’m worried about your health.” Phrase it in terms of health. Just send them to the doctor, you guys. The doctor will know what to do. Hopefully. [Megan and advocates laugh].
In directing advocates to “send [victims] to the doctor” if they suspected that their disordered eating was putting them in immediate physical danger, Megan elevated the practice of safety over the practice of empowerment. CHF advocates—like Adriana above—sometimes pushed back against the practice of safety. They took victims’ decision to reach out to CHF, rather than the police or healthcare providers, as evidence of their knowledge that CHF was best situated to provide the care they needed. CHF staff members, however, explained, like staff psychologist Brenda, that “[s]urvivors can’t think when they’re experiencing trauma. Their prefrontal cortex is minimized while their amygdala is overstimulated.” In less medicalized terms, Marta similarly explained during a volunteer training that advocates were to assess and act to ensure victims’ safety even when victims’ themselves did not identify safety as a central concern.
Marta: When callers are in the heat of the moment, we need to make sure they’ve accessed medical or law enforcement. That should be their priority, not our hotline call. Their safety is number one.
Volunteer: Why would someone call our hotline instead of law enforcement?
Marta: Sometimes they have our number saved, especially if they’ve reached out in the past. So, they think we’re the people to call. Also, sometimes law enforcement gives survivors our number, so survivors think that they should call us in the case of domestic violence.
Here, victims’ decision to call a hotline rather than law enforcement was constructed as a mistake, rather than an empowered choice. Again, this elevation of the state logic over the professional was not a blip, but rather evidence of a larger pattern. Staff member Adriana, for example, during a separate training on stalking similarly disregarded victims’ decision to call the hotline rather than 911.
When we’re working hotline, it’s important for us to always address safety. We might be able to hear the abuser or stalker in the background, or the survivor might tell us that a stalker is outside. For some reason, people call the hotline instead of calling 911. Always encourage survivors to hang up and call 911. Also, offer to call 911 for them.
The language of “for some reason” suggests that, for Adriana, victims’ decision to call the hotline rather than 911 was inexplicable. The correct decision, for victims, should be to call 911, which Adriana told volunteers they should “encourage” victims to do. The practice of safety— couched in the state logic—seems to directly contradict the professional logic’s practice of empowerment. In the following section, I show that these paradoxical practices confused novice advocates while expert advocates tacitly pieced the empowerment and safety practices together.
Tenure and the Navigation of Institutional Complexity
While all CHF advocates confronted both the professional and state logic, and thus were expected to both empower and safeguard victims with whom they interacted, not all advocates understood them to be contradictory. Specifically, expert advocates comfortably empowered victims to safeguard themselves, thereby satisfying both the professional and state logics. Novice advocates, conversely, struggled to satisfy both logics and often ended up practicing only empowerment or safety.
Expert Advocates
Expert advocates at CHF creatively combined elements of the professional and state logics in a feat of institutional bricolage (Christiansen and Lounsbury 2013; Duymedjian and Rüling 2010; Jarzabkowski et al. 2013). During an interview, Adriana illustrated well how experienced advocates empowered victims to safeguard themselves.
So, I had one lady come in recently and she was minimizing the abuse. And she had her son too. Her son was probably seven or eight. So, she started talking about the abuse and then he started asking me like, “Why did he hit my mom? Why is this happening?” And then, I guess law enforcement somehow got involved and he had this negative perception of law enforcement. So, I was able to safety plan with her. I was able to talk about strangulation and how like he's not trying to push [you] away. He's trying to hurt you. He's putting his hands against your throat. He's trying to hurt you. Like helping her understand that this guy is gonna kill you if you continue dating him. And then helping him, the little boy talk, just safety planning with him. Like, “Okay, if [the abuser] comes to the door, what are you gonna do? You call mommy.”
And then, at the end of that, I was able to walk out and have an officer come in, cuz he was afraid of law enforcement, and [the officer] gave him a little sticker and [the victim’s son] even hugged the officer. And just knowing that you can impact and make changes like that especially with her helping her see the situation she’s in cuz a lot of time they don't see it or understand the severity of what's going on. And like I told her, and I tell most of my survivors is, “That little kid is seven or eight,” you know. “If you guys are alone in the house fighting, who’s gonna protect you? Who’s gonna get in the middle?” you know. They’re gonna probably get hurt because they’re trying to defend mom. And God forbid social services gets involved. And just helping them understand that this is not gonna end well. And knowing that I have made an impact in many people’s life is just amazing. I know we have saved a life or two.
Adriana recognized that the above victim may have been in immediate physical danger. Rather than simply instructing her call law enforcement, however, Adriana recognized what barriers prevented the victim and her child from keeping themselves safe—namely, lack of knowledge and distrust of the police—and addressed them directly. Adriana discussed with the victim why, exactly, strangulation is dangerous and brokered a personal introduction between a law enforcement officer and the victim’s child to break down distrust. In so doing, Adriana empowered both the victim and her child to safeguard themselves, illustrating how expert advocates creatively combined elements of the professional and state logics.
Novice Advocates
Adriana and other expert advocates, however, were unique in their capacity to empower victims to address their own safety. Many advocates—particularly novice volunteer advocates—struggled to overcome paradoxical directives to empower and safeguard. Rather than bringing the two together, advocates often centered either the empowerment directive or the safety directive, much to the consternation of experienced advocates. For example, Manuel, a new volunteer, described to me a particularly challenging “role play,” or mock hotline call he practiced with Faith, an expert volunteer “coach.”
In my profession, I’m a pastor. Normally when someone comes with something going on, they want me to say, okay, you need to do this this this and that. One role play that I had, Faith [an experienced volunteer who had been with the organization for nearly a decade] was [pretending to be] someone who was in immediate danger, and it sounded like that. I’m like, oh my god, you have to call 911. No, [Faith] said, you’re being directive. If she’s in imminent danger, why would she call the hotline instead of 911?
In the role play Manuel described, Faith directly contradicted the practice of safety as described by staff members earlier in Manuel’s training. Staff, like Marta earlier, warned advocates that victims might sometimes call the hotline when they should really, according to her, call the police. Manuel took this warning to heart and, in a role play, told a victim he perceived to be in immediate danger to call the police. Manuel failed to consider, however, that the staff, including Marta, also instructed volunteers to always follow victims’ lead. For Faith and other coaches responsible for preparing advocates for their work, Manuel’s failure to bring the practices of empowerment and safety together was concerning. During a debrief for coaches earlier in the training, Faith reflected on Manuel’s role play.
I had problems with his language being very directive. I was clear in my feedback with him.
Jade, another volunteer coach with many years of experience at CHF, picked up on Faith’s critique.
Jade: These fears that they have to save the world. We’re not accountable, we’re not responsible, people have to save themselves. What we do is give them options.
Faith: Yup, you can’t fix it.
Jade: You can’t even help people unless they want the help.
Manuel’s practice of only safety, then, was concerning for the coaches. Jade reiterated that the role of the advocate was to empower victims with knowledge, not to “save” them, an approach that inappropriately centered the agency of advocates over victims. Whereas Manuel’s strategy for managing the contradiction between empowerment and safety was to minimize empowerment, other volunteers abandoned safety in favor of empowerment. During an interview, for example, Kiara told me about her experience on the hotline.
Kiara: I think the challenge for me is like they’re in a moment of crisis. Sometimes I'm talking to a person, and like they’re not physically in a safe space, but they’re definitely not in like a mentally safe space.
Author: Yeah.
Kiara: You know, they’re…. And I think that the pressure of that was the most challenging thing…. Like it was less about like word selection, but sometimes you just want to be like you should call the police, you should do this. But that’s—and I don’t have the right to say that. And I think the most valuable thing that I learned in CHF like was this idea like everyone is an expert on their own experience, and how we need to like approach our entire lives that way.
Kiara recognized that callers were sometimes in immediate physical danger. Prioritizing a professional logic, however—“everyone is an expert on their own experience” —Kiara ignored the safety directive and held off on instructing endangered victims to involve law enforcement. Management of contradiction in favor of empowerment, too, was met with coaches’ frustration. At the debrief of another role-play session, Katrina, an experienced volunteer and coach, told fellow coaches about a new volunteer’s failure to address safety.
The only real correction I made was to Camille, who didn’t assess my safety even though I was sobbing and screaming, “he’s outside.” After I gave my feedback, she said, “Well, you were [pretending to be] at a [high school] reunion, I figured there were lots of people around.” I told her, “I didn’t say I was at a reunion until a couple minutes into the call. Be sure to assess safety every time at the beginning of the call.”
In signaling in her role play that her “abuser” was nearby, Katrina meant to provide a novice advocate with the opportunity the demonstrate her capacity to practice safety. The novice advocate, however, deferred entirely to the “caller,” assuming that she already was making the decision that made the most sense to her. In Katrina’s response—and in responses of Faith and Jade above—we see that novices’ failure to combine both the empowerment and safety practices was frustrating to expert advocates. This illustrates that experts tacitly empowered victims to make themselves safe and struggled to understand why doing so was so challenging for some novices.
Discussion and Conclusion
Three years of participant observation and forty in-depth interviews in an anti-GBV organization called CHF revealed two coexisting logics: the professional social work logic and the bureaucratic state logic. The professional logic updated older social welfare logics by pursuing individuals’ self-transformation as its central goal. To help people help themselves, adherents to the professional logic practiced empowerment, or the surfacing and elevation of individuals’ innate understandings of their needs and capacity for addressing them. The state logic, conversely, stemmed from CHF’s dependence on the state for money and legitimacy. This logic’s central goal was legal compliance, and consistent and equal fulfillment of obligation. In practice, the state logic required adherents to practice safety, or the assessment and assurance of victims’ immediate bodily integrity.
Novice victim advocates—those who were undergoing training or had only been volunteering for a short period of time—often struggled to practice both empowerment and safety at once. Instead, they chose to either empower or safeguard the victims with whom they interacted. This confused, and at times frustrated, expert victim advocates—staff members and experienced volunteer advocates—who creatively combined the professional and state logics by empowering victims to safeguard themselves. That novices’ confusion confused experts reveals the taken-for-grantedness of their institutional bricolage. Experts thought little about paradoxes intrinsic to prescriptions to both empower and safeguard victims. Rather, they tacitly resolved them.
Of course, tenure at CHF was not the only factor shaping advocates’ capacity to manage contradictory logics. Some volunteer advocates were “novices” at CHF, for example—in other words, they had only recently begun volunteering—but had spent time volunteering for other similar agencies. For them, directives to simultaneously empower and safeguard victims were not as confusing as they were for advocates truly new to the anti-GBV field. Similarly, demographic characteristics such as race or life experiences such as histories of violence may have shaped advocates’ relationship to either the professional social work or bureaucratic state logic. Without denying the possibility of other factors shaping complexity’s management, my focus here is on tenure because of its generalizability. While demographic variation, for example, and the importance of it, will vary across contexts, all organizations welcome and socialize new members. Thus, by focusing on how novice advocates differ from expert ones, I introduce inexperience as a lens through which organizational scholars might understand institutional complexity more broadly.
Extensive research already tracks how organizational elites and professionals combine, disintegrate, and segregate contradictory logics (Greenwood et al. 2011; Jarzabkowski et al. 2013; Kraatz and Block 2008). Their creative management of contradiction, however, is often tacit, thereby leaving obscure the sources of logics’ incompatibility. By focusing on novices, this paper reveals that practices central to professional and state logics, rather than their associated assumptions, or beliefs, or goals, are incompatible. The prescription to both empower and safeguard victims confused novices. Left unchallenged by advocates, however, were, for example, the simultaneous belief in victims’ knowledge and the belief in state legitimacy or the pursuit of victims’ autonomous decision-making and the pursuit of good recordkeeping. This shows, for organizational scholars, that novices elucidate, through their confusion or frustration or mistakes, the grounds upon which multiple logics do or do not cohere.
Notes
I recognize both that the definition and internal coherence of “institutional logics” as a concept are contested (Hallett and Hawbaker 2021). So as to avoid the term’s capacity to subsume all social life within it (Alvesson and Spicer 2019; Fine and Hallett 2014), I limit it here only to refer to clustered meanings and practices that are observable, as the logics and their constitutive parts in this paper are, in the real world (Delbridge and Edwards 2013).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the many people who contributed to the development of this paper, including, most immediately, Andrew Deener, editor-in-chief at Qualitative Sociology, and two anonymous reviewers, whose insights greatly clarified my thinking and writing. Additionally, I presented earlier versions of this paper at the 2023 Ethnography and Qualitative Research Conference in Trento, Italy, and the 2022 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Los Angeles, CA, where I benefitted immensely from attendees’ and panelists’ feedback. Lastly, I am grateful to the volunteers and staff members at the Center for Healthy Futures who graciously welcomed me into their work.
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Open access funding provided by SCELC, Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium. This paper was supported by a Haynes Foundation Faculty Fellowship and a MacArthur International Grant from Occidental College.
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Weiss, B.R. To Empower or Safeguard? How Novice Rape and Domestic Violence Victim Advocates Render Institutional Complexity Visible. Qual Sociol 46, 603–624 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-023-09544-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-023-09544-8