Abstract
The marketization of nonprofit organizations is often taken for granted as an inevitable fact. Drawing on the institutional logics and discursive resources perspective, I examine the organizing practices of two shelters that serve homeless women in the same area. In my analysis, I argue that a Discursive approach to institutional logics has much to offer in examining differences between nonprofit organizations as these organizations enact their organizational mission. Using comparative ethnographic methods, I examine how each organization sought to enact a social welfare institutional logic, and how that enactment resulted in more normative or alternative organizing practices. At one organization the social welfare institutional logic was translated into getting clients ‘back on track’ while at the other shelter it was translated as practicing ‘hospitality’. I argue that these translations served as primary discursive resources that both enabled preferred organizational practices and productively maintained tensions between conflicting Discourses.
Keywords
Studies in nonprofit organizing are increasingly concerned with how business-thinking and for-profit mentalities are taking hold in the nonprofit sector (e.g. Jensen, 2018). Some scholars have argued that the tensions between for-profit and nonprofit organizational norms may be a productive space for new organizational praxis (e.g. Sanders and McClellan, 2014). However, other research cautions that increased use of market rationalities in the nonprofit sector may lead to a loss of services for some vulnerable populations (e.g. Dempsey, 2012). Regardless of orientation, much of this work has treated this shift towards more marketized organizing as inevitable (e.g. Harrow and Phillips, 2013).
In response to concerns about the encroachment of neoliberal thinking into not only the nonprofit sector but other types of organizations as well, some scholars have begun to explore alternatives to capitalist organizational forms. These alternatives arise not only from concerns about the immediate problems associated with more marketized ways of organizing but also about the long-term viability of organizations dominated by neoliberal values (Parker et al., 2014a).
In this article, I use an institutional logics (ILs) perspective to explicate the differences between two organizations that serve homeless women. I argue that one organization makes sense of its organizational mission by drawing on normative neoliberal and paternalist Discourses to get clients ‘back on track’. I contrast this more normative organization’s practices with an alternative case that draws on alternative organizing Discourses of anarchism and feminism to engage in a mission of ‘hospitality’.
Nonprofit and alternative organizing
Nonprofit organizing in the United States is regularly characterized by the tension between the social welfare mission and the need to navigate a shifting market economy (e.g. Sanders and McClellan, 2014). To meet these demands, many nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have adopted increasingly market-based practices to appear fiscally healthy and ensure that they attract donors, both private and public (Jensen, 2018). Unfortunately, the market practices and rationalities that these organizations adopt may come at the expense of social mission, leading to mission drift and the violation of core organizational values (Baines, 2010), which can be especially troubling when those NPOs are serving precarious communities like the homeless.
Neoliberal organizing Discourse centers on the valorization of market values and the belief in equal opportunity for individuals to become whatever they wish via the ‘free market’ (Harvey, 2007). Neoliberalism differs from other forms of liberalism in many ways, but most important to this project is the emphasis on personal responsibility and the responsibility for individuals to shape themselves into market commodities (most commonly through the institution of wage labor) (Wacquant, 2009). Thus, the project for NPOs is often to both ‘fill in the gap’ left by the reduction of public services, and to work to reconstitute ‘deviants’ into productive members of society (Piven and Cloward, 1993) and to do so in a fiscally efficient manner.
While business or corporate organizational form is an increasingly accepted organizational reality across a variety of sectors (Harrow and Phillips, 2013), attention is shifting to an examination of the alternatives to capitalist and market-based organizational forms (Parker et al., 2014a). Although the question of alternatives to capitalist organizational forms is not new (e.g. Rothschild-Witt, 1979), the question has received renewed interest from organizational scholars and has been approached from a variety of theoretical lenses and contexts. For example, Cruz (2017) examines alternative banking practices among market women in West Africa. Del Fa (2018) takes a constitutive approach to examine an alternative university program, while Jensen and Meisenbach (2015) examine how an anarchist homeless shelter communicatively manages its (in)visibility. Other work on alternative organizations has largely focused on the creation and maintenance of alternative economic spaces that arise in response to the crises of neoliberal global capitalism (e.g. Daskalaki, 2018) or the rise of social movements, like Occupy, that challenge common notions of organizing (e.g. Piven, 2013). In each of these examples, participants in these organizations and their members create space for themselves by organizing outside of or in opposition to what might be classified as ‘traditional’ (Cheney, 2014) or what I call normative organizational forms.
However, no organization is completely normative or completely alternative (Parker et al., 2014b), but rather navigates tensions between normative and alternative organizing practices. To explore alternative organizing in NPOS, I make use of the ILs perspective. The next section overviews what I refer to as a ‘Discursive’ approach to ILs, which foregrounds the role that organizing Discourses play in the manifestation of normative and alternative organizing practices, which in turn manifest in organizational heterogeneity.
A Discursive approach to institutional logics
Thornton and Ocasio (2008: 102) defined ILs as, ‘The socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality.’ In other words, ILs provide an explicitly epistemic lens through which to understand organizing practice by bringing to the fore an understanding of how those practices are linked to both values and beliefs as they are bound within a socio-historical context. An ILs perspective generally takes as its starting point that organizations are places of interwoven and, at times, contradictory logics and that the navigation of those logics is key for understanding organizational practice and difference between organizations (Coule and Patmore, 2013; Durand et al., 2013).
Previous research using ILs to study organizational heterogeneity has focused on the navigation of multiple logics, both contradictory and complementary, to explicate differences within an organizational field. For example, it has been argued that a market IL may interact differently with family and state logics depending on the size, visibility, and significance of an organization (Greenwood et al., 2010). Other scholarship has examined how organizational members may selectively engage with parts of conflicting logics in localized manners to navigate felt contradictions and tensions in organizational practice (e.g. Alvehus, 2018). In nonprofit organizing, these discussions have centered on the navigation between market and/or corporate logics and social welfare logic (e.g. Pache and Santos, 2013). This has resulted in an analysis of how organizations navigate logics focused on profit, self-interest, and hierarchy (Thornton et al., 2012) that is put into tension with a social welfare logic which focuses on the provision of services, local control, and democratic decision making (Pache and Santos, 2013). From this perspective, nonprofit organizing scholarship has generally focused on navigation between these tensions to explicate increased reliance on market solutions and rationalities for the resolution of social problems (e.g. Garrow and Hasenfeld, 2014). Thus, as in other types of organizations, differences between NPOs are generally explained by differences in the navigation of these (often conflicting logics) by the organization.
However, I argue that an alternative explanation for organizational difference may be understood by engaging with the role of organizing Discourses in the manifestation of daily organizing practice. Borrowing from Foucault (1977), I view Discourse as abstracted systems of knowledge and knowing that shape everyday practice. I argue that ILs serve as the filter through which these abstracted systems of knowledge are translated and transformed into practice through the mobilization of discursive resources. Discursive resources can be understood as communicative practices (both linguistic and behavioral) that support and regulate preferred understandings of experience and the world (Kuhn et al., 2008). Much of the work on discursive resources has focused on individual identity work (e.g. Clarke et al., 2009). However, the concept’s emphasis on how communicative practice defines experience and maintains preferred structures (Kuhn et al., 2008) renders it useful for examining how organizations and their members align organizational practice with broader systems of knowledge and value. It is through these discursive resources then that communicative action reflects, reifies, and constitutes organizations within an institutional field (Cornelissen et al., 2015).
Friedland (2009) argued that ILs emerge from a ‘substance’, or the guiding values and standards of rationality that govern a social world. In this framework, a substance is the governing idea of an institutional field and that ILs are linked to overarching Discourses. These Discourses interact with daily organizing practices and discursive resources in ways that are often difficult to track (Mutch, 2018). It is worth noting that each level is mutually constitutive, with discursive resources having the capacity to change ILs, and ILs possessing the capacity to change Discourses and vice versa.
This emphasis on Discourse has two primary advantages. First, an ILs perspective supplemented by attending to the role of Discourse creates opportunities to ask about the selection of logics, instead of analyzing how their presence impacts organizing structures. While I agree that this conflict and tension between logics plays a significant role, I argue that a more significant difference may be understood by unpacking how fundamentally different understandings of an IL may provide a stronger case for these organizational differences. By approaching ILs as they are embedded in larger, more abstract systems of knowledge, the focus for analysis shifts. For example, rather than examining how NPOs navigate tensions between market and social welfare logics, a Discursive approach questions the presence of the market logic in nonprofit organizing by unpacking the role of underlying systems of knowledge.
Second, examining Discourse in this manner creates opportunities for articulating how the selection or rejection of particular ILs is central in understanding alternative organizing practices. Rather than simply examining the IL as the source of organizational practice, the logic becomes the filter through which abstracted Discursive structures are transformed into organizational practice. However, this research departs from some earlier scholarship that has examined local translations of ILs, which have focused at the individual level (e.g. Barbour and Manly, 2016). Instead, I argue that organizations have preferred Discursive interpretations of ILs which may align with or supersede organizational members’ interpretations, which manifest in the discursive resources they mobilize. While individual organizational members can and do resist organizationally preferred interpretations, these interpretations structure organizing practice both through implicit cultural control as well as through explicit organizational policy. These preferred Discursive interpretations of ILs are central in understanding not only why organizations engage with or reject ILs, but how these broader Discourses manifest in the disciplining forces of an institutional field. This interest in enactment and resistance of dominant Discourses in the nonprofit sector, in particular as it relates to the role of neoliberalism in the nonprofit sector, leads to my research question.
RQ: How do normative and alternative Discourses manifest in differing translations of a social welfare institutional logic at two NPOs?
Methods
To answer my research question, I engaged in a comparative ethnography of two homeless shelters for single women and women with families in the same midsized Midwestern city. I deliberately chose organizations that could serve as ‘edge cases’ to provide a contrast in organizing practices. Due to a smaller number of possible organizations, I first sought out what I assumed would be my alternative case. I selected Judy’s Place (JP) based on previous experiences with another Catholic Worker hospitality house, which was described by its members as a Christian, pacifist, and anarchist organization. The primary service JP offers is as a home for 13 women and their families. As resources allow, JP also provides bike repair, hygiene supplies, and sandwiches to members of their community. Although JP is affiliated with the Catholic Worker movement, this affiliation does not provide any financial support or oversight for the organization.
In looking through JP’s online material, the wording of their explanation for not being a tax-exempt organization solidified it as a possible choice as the organization sought to position itself as engaging in an alternative cultural model:
Furthermore, we seek to create an alternative culture where giving is celebrated and human needs are met directly through close, personal human relationships. Thus, all of our funding comes from individuals like you who share yourself and your funds so that this work can go on.
Also, in comparison to an increasingly professionalized nonprofit sector (Sanders and McClellan, 2014), JP is run entirely by volunteer ‘workers’ or ‘community members’ who either live in the house or in the neighborhood. In addition to the workers, JP has a network of regular volunteers who acted as housetakers who helped watch the house during five-hour shifts. While serving as a housetaker, volunteers would answer phones, admit new guests (the term used to describe the people who used the services at JP), and help with meal preparation as needed. Finally, JP had a large group of volunteers who help with cooking meals, house maintenance, and cleaning.
The second shelter provides an example of the normative nonprofit organizing practices, to which I gave the pseudonym Midwest Safe Family (MSF). MSF was selected based on the criteria that it served the same population, in the same general area, accepted government contract funding and that it would fit the model of a more ‘corporate’ organizational form. While there was no guarantee that MSF would provide the normative contrast my research was interested in, the differences between the organizations made MSF likely to provide a useful comparison to JP.
MSF is affiliated with a large international religious NPO which I gave the pseudonym Saving Grace. I identified MSF as the target for comparison after receiving permission from JP to conduct my observations. MSF is located approximately 20 miles from JP and works with a similar population (some of the women at JP had also stayed at MSF). However, there were key differences that could be identified externally, which I believed would make the organization a good target for comparison. First was the issue of size, MSF housed approximately 60 women and their families (making it one of the largest shelters in the area) along with other programs like a food pantry and a shelter for male veterans. Second, was the relation to an overarching organization as well as how MSF secured external funding. To support its various projects, MSF received funding from their parent organization Saving Grace, external funding organizations like United Way, and substantial support from federal government agencies like Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Finally, in contrast to the reliance on volunteer labor, MSF used paid staff to support their clients with almost no volunteer involvement.
The decision to observe multiple sites, as opposed to simply focusing on one alternative organization, was grounded in a desire to provide a stronger empirical argument for what it meant for an organization to be viewed as normative or alternative. Moreover, with an institutional framework, the use of multiple sites provides a stronger basis for claims about the field as a whole (Barley and Tolbert, 1997). After four months in the field, I began collecting my first interviews, which shaped my continued engagement with the research site. By comparing the organizing practices of one normative and one alternative NPO, I am able to examine how organizations facing similar challenges use more or less normative organizing practices based on normative or alternative organizing Discourses.
During observations, I engaged in a performative method of data collection (Conquergood, 1991), which included (as much as possible) becoming an active participant at both sites of data collection. At MSF, this immersion generally took the form of shadowing various members of the staff, sitting in on and leading morning group meetings with the clients, and spending time in common areas. As a white man in two predominantly Black spaces, my research participants made sense of my time in the organizations in different ways. During observations at MSF, I quickly became identified with the staff (often being referred to as an intern), which impacted the data collection process. At JP, most of my observations occurred as I served as a housetaker. This offered me an opportunity to build deeper relationships with many of the guests as well as allowing me to contribute to the organization. In total, I spent 234 hours over the course of six months observing both organizations, resulting in 247 pages of single-spaced field notes. These shifting roles, as ‘housetaker’ and ‘intern’, impacted the data collected. For example, at JP my role as housetaker facilitated relationships with both workers and guests. However, while my role as ‘intern’ provided several opportunities to be ‘taught’ by the staff at MSF, it erected a barrier between me and the clients (Jensen et al., 2020).
To supplement my observations, I also conducted 15 semi-structured interviews. I conducted seven interviews at MSF with my participants including two administrators, three staff, and two clients. I conducted eight interviews at JP with my participants including four workers, two volunteers, and two guests. All but one interview was audio-recorded, with one participant requesting that I take notes for their interview due to concerns about confidentiality. In interviews, I asked questions related to the participant’s understanding of the organization’s mission, its strengths, weaknesses, reasons for homelessness, what made the shelter unique, and if it did not emerge organically during the interview, I asked participants how they understood responsibility. Interviews lasted 45 minutes on average and were transcribed, resulting in 262 single-spaced pages.
Finally, I collected artifacts from both organizations, including logbooks, newsletters, intake packets, employee handbooks, and memos. I also took note of the decorations (e.g. posters and paintings) that each organization used, as they were often indicative of underlying organizational assumptions. Organizational artifacts provided another 522 pages of data.
Analysis
Analysis of my data occurred in three phases. The first phase began as I engaged in memo-writing (Charmaz, 2006), which began early during my data collection. These memos highlighted both emergent meaning in my data as well as offering me opportunities to explore how my data interacted with the theoretical framework I was seeking to develop. The second phase of analysis began four months into my data collection as I started my iterative analysis (Tracy, 2013). An iterative analysis borrows from grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006; Corbin and Strauss, 2015) in that it seeks emergent meaning that arises in data to analyze process. However, it differs from grounded theory by creating space for existing theories and concepts. I first engaged in a ‘primary-cycle coding’ (Tracy, 2013) process during which I read and re-read the data and coded what I viewed as instances. My initial codes were largely descriptive and focused on action within the instance (e.g. helping with job search, talking about responsibility, quantifying success), which helped me to remain focused on organizing processes. At this stage of coding, I focused on emergent meanings in the data as opposed to coding based on the sensitizing concepts from the extant literature.
Next, I engaged in secondary-cycle coding. The goal of secondary coding is to move beyond description and to provide analysis and interpretation of events. Second-level codes provided synthesis and analytic weight to the coding done on the first level, and it is at this stage of coding that the theoretical constructs began to feature more heavily. I had come to the project with the belief that ILs and Discourses would provide a useful lens for studying alternative organizing. However, it was also during this stage that I realized that my initial constructs were limited. For example, while neoliberal Discourse appeared to inform the organizing logics at MSF, I found it impossible to articulate how it did independently of the role of paternalism.
As I engaged in this second-level coding, I sought to arrange the data hierarchically as well as tweak the primary codes to improve their descriptive usefulness through a process of lumping and splitting (Corbin and Strauss, 2015). For example, upon examination of the ‘talking about responsibility’ codes, I noticed that a large subset of these dealt with the staff at MSF praising personal responsibility. I changed the relevant codes to ‘praising personal responsibility’ and added a new code ‘taking responsibility for others’. The new code ‘praising personal responsibility’ resonated well with other codes labeled ‘getting back on track’ and ‘holding people accountable’, which were often used in reference to MSF’s mission. Based on the sensitizing concepts from previous literature, I grouped these codes together as being linked to the social welfare logic of the organization. I also compared these coded segments to the understanding of the organizing Discourses as they had been described in the extant literature.
Throughout this process, I also engaged in constant comparison (Charmaz, 2006; Tracy, 2013) within and between the organizations. In the course of these comparisons, I was looking for similarities as well as differences. One of the most obvious similarities between the two organizations was that, despite their different attitudes towards the women with whom they worked, both maintained a curfew policy. However, there were stark differences as well. For example, the understanding of the root causes of homelessness differed drastically from MSF and JP. This iterative coding process, where I moved from emic and etic readings of the data, resulted in an analysis that first examined discursive practice and sought to link those practices to the more abstract concepts of logics and Discourses.
Validation
To ensure that my claims were meaningful, I engaged in the process of triangulation (Creswell, 2007), where multiple sources of data are drawn upon to create a more holistic and accurate representation of the organization. To triangulate my findings, I used organizational artifacts (e.g. posters, logbook entries, handbooks), participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. Also, my research design encouraged prolonged engagement, which Creswell (2007) claims involves more than simply learning the culture, but also provides opportunities to correct researcher assumptions. During observations and interviews, I was provided opportunities to discuss preliminary findings with research participants.
Enacting and resisting neoliberal organizing
At MSF, the organizing practices reflected a social welfare IL that was shaped by neoliberal and paternalistic organizing Discourses. At MSF, the neoliberal translation led to the primary goal of the organization to (re)integrate and (re)constitute its clients into the market. Participants within the organization translated the neoliberal-paternalist organizing Discourses into a more grounded and intelligible discursive resource by defining their mission as getting clients ‘back on track’. In contrast, at JP the social welfare IL manifested in practices aimed not only at helping individual women but also in seeking to address the systems that created homelessness. Like the workers at MSF, the volunteers and workers at JP articulated their understanding of how they should fulfill their mission by talking about ‘practicing hospitality’ as not only a way to help their guests but also as a way to enact social change.
Social welfare institutional logic as ‘back on track’
The goal of (re)integrating clients at MSF into productive society was interwoven into nearly every interaction between staff and clients. In everyday talk, the staff members regularly framed this mission as getting their clients ‘back on track’. At MSF, getting back on track meant that a certain number of measurable and material goals had been achieved and placing clients into housing. However, while housing served as the primary metric of getting back on track, one case manager, Janet, articulated a series of other criteria for being considered ‘on track’ at the shelter. After Janet used the phrase in an interview, I asked her what she meant by it, and she responded that:
At one point in time that they were considered to being on track, they were living the quote–unquote normal life of working, having a home. Some of them not having the mental stress and anxiety. Some of them weren’t experiencing domestic violence and all of that. And some got into alcohol. They think about income. Saving Grace’s mission would be to get them back to or at least reasonably close to it as possible. Because you know . . . you got to work. Got to have an income.
While Janet’s definition of on track covers a variety of issues, all of them are targeted at the positioning of the clients at MSF so that they can be as ‘productive’ as possible once they re-enter the market. Janet’s discursive articulation of ‘back on track’ represented MSF’s neoliberal interpretation of the IL of social welfare and shows how that interpretation impacts the nonprofit mission. In a neoliberal state, the mission of NPOs like MSF is the (re)subjectification of the homeless women they served from ‘nonworking deviants’ to productive subjects (Wacquant, 2009). The primary discursive resource of getting clients ‘back on track’ was mobilized through the (often tension-filled) secondary discursive resources of personal responsibility and providing structure.
Personal responsibility
To encourage their clients to get ‘back on track’, staff at MSF regularly mobilized discursive resources of neoliberal interpretations of personal responsibility in their interactions with clients. For example, at morning group meetings that nonworking clients were required to attend, staff regularly guided conversation to have clients take full responsibility for their homeless status. When clients discussed structural challenges (e.g. bus schedules or affordable childcare) they were dismissed as making excuses. In one group meeting, Janet remarked that ‘lies and excuses’ kept the clients from receiving the help they needed. Other staff echoed these sentiments, claiming that the women needed to not only take responsibility for themselves but to avoid becoming involved with other people. One staff member, Sarah, stated that women at the shelter should be selfish and that once they were out they should avoid becoming involved with their neighbors or helping anyone but themselves and their children.
This emphasis on responsibility as the path towards freedom was reflected not only in direct interactions between staff and clients but also in the decorations in the shelter. One motivational poster on the second floor read ‘Opportunity’ in large letters and depicted what it labeled as a ‘Colored School Room’ from 1943. Below the picture of young Black children at tables presided over by a Black teacher, the text read ‘Being able to see past traditional barriers and having an intense belief in your ideas and abilities will help you take advantage of any opportunity.’ Another poster down the hall depicted Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks under the word ‘Destiny’ and the text below reading ‘The choices you make in life ultimately determine your destiny.’
Although staff remained consistent in their mobilization of the discursive resource of responsibility when dealing directly with clients, interactions between staff suggested that this consistency was, in part, impacted by organizationally preferred understandings of the mission of the organization. While discussing childcare with clients, a staff member in charge of helping clients with education and childcare named Bethany, stated that proper planning and persistence could overcome difficulties. However, at an impromptu meeting in the program director’s office, Bethany discussed how the women in the shelter were ‘well and truly stuck’ when it came to affordable childcare options. The three other staff in the room nodded their agreement, and we brainstormed some potential ways to help the clients overcome this barrier. The conversation about childcare with only staff present contrasted sharply from how it was discussed with clients. I argue that this contrast resulted as a manifestation of the neoliberally informed social welfare institutional logic of ‘back on track’ manifesting in the silencing of staff when engaging with clients. Staff who did not embrace this logic risked teasing; for example, Bethany reported struggling with how the shelter prioritized short-term employment and housing over what she saw as longer-term solutions like education. While she appeared to have adapted by the time I began observations, she was often referred to as ‘Rebel’ for her clashes with other staff, particularly Sarah. In the end, the shelter’s goal of back on track was most consistently viewed in terms of (re)subjectification of clients to be ‘responsible’ market agents.
Providing structure
To achieve this neoliberal (re)subjectification, the social welfare IL at MSF also productively drew on paternalist Discourse. A social welfare IL shaped by paternalism in a homeless shelter is reflected in organizational practices that limit the agency of those who make use of the services at the organization (Soss et al., 2011). These practices are often rooted in the assumption that the clients at shelters like MSF are incapable of acting responsibly without direct oversight (Jones et al., 2011). Discursively, these policies and rules were positioned as providing the necessary structure to get clients ‘on track’.
Staff sometimes cited a lack of discipline by clients or an inability to structure their lives as one of the reasons they became homeless. When I asked Bethany why she thought organizations like MSF were needed she responded:
A lot of families need structure . . . I feel like sometimes you’re here because of a lack of structure. It could be a lack of budgeting, it could be having a job but not spending in the right manner, so the structure. My whole thing is you’re not going to be here that long, trying to get this [bank account] full again so you sustain what you need, so you don’t come back here.
Bethany’s comment reflects both her belief that the shelter needs to exist (in part) because the clients are unable to structure their lives and budget well, and that one of the ways the shelter helps is to provide that lacking structure. Janet shared this belief, reflecting in her interview that she wished the shelter could be a 180-day program because it was too short a time to change behaviors and help the women at MSF learn to hold themselves accountable. Likewise, when I asked Janet what she believed the shelter could do better, she stated that they needed to do more to hold the women accountable for their actions, even if it meant removing them from the shelter for rule violations.
The paternalist Discursive translation of ‘back on track’ through the provision of structures emerged throughout the organization, in practices ranging from curfews to surveillance cameras. However, most telling was the financial policy to which clients were expected to adhere. During the intake process, clients were required to report all sources of income (through work or aid programs) and all outstanding debts. This information provided a basis for a budget plan that would help the clients qualify for housing programs, but it came with incredibly tight restrictions. Clients were required to either ‘bank’ through MSF or to provide regular statements of their accounts to their case managers. This practice regularly met with resistance as clients sought to either hide sources of income or refused to show their account information to shelter staff. One client, shortly before choosing to leave the shelter, argued that the staff ‘knew too much’ and argued that she wanted to ‘take care of my own business’. This last example shows an inherent tension between the discursive resources of responsibility and providing structure. While staff encouraged clients to take responsibility for themselves, the structures they provided and enforced limited the ability of clients to be responsible.
In this section, I have discussed how neoliberal and paternalist organizing Discourses were both used to inform MSF’s translation of the social welfare IL. Staff and administrators translated their mission into getting clients ‘back on track’ and engaged in sometimes conflicting organizing practices rooted in the supporting discursive resources of ‘responsibility’ and ‘providing structure’. The next section examines how anarcho-feminist organizing Discourses were translated at JP.
Social welfare institutional logic as practicing hospitality
Homelessness at JP was discursively positioned as a manifestation of systematic imbalances. Thus, the organization worked to address the daily needs of the homeless women with whom it worked and to confront structural issues that they saw as responsible for homelessness. Both of these goals, confronting systemic imbalance while providing immediate aid to homeless women were cast under the discursive resource of ‘hospitality’. To make sense of their social welfare IL as hospitality, JP drew on anarchist and feminist organizing Discourses.
Constructive anarchy (Shantz, 2010) as an organizing Discourse seeks to challenge social structures that create the conditions necessary for oppressive systems to flourish. Rather than seeking to integrate marginalized groups into oppressive systems, constructive anarchy seeks wholesale systemic change. Thus, an organization grounded in constructive anarchy eschews the adoption of organizing practices that mirror the oppressive structures it seeks to address. However, constructive anarchy maintains a pragmatic dimension, and as an organizing Discourse, it recognizes the need to also work within the existing social system (Shantz, 2010).
Defining ‘feminism’ as an organizing Discourse is, at best, difficult. As Harris (2016) noted, feminism is rife with contradictions and paradoxes. For the purpose of this article, three aspects of feminist theorizing function as central to providing the rationality for organizing practices. First, issues pertaining to the intersectionality of race, class, and gender (Saatcioglu and Corus, 2014) inform how oppression is understood and confronted at a systemic level. Second, the feminist practice of consciousness-raising (Bickford and Reynolds, 2002) shapes how JP engages in part of its social welfare mission. Finally, a feminist ethic of care (Gilligan, 1982) underscores the way that mutually supportive and individualized relationships are shaped and encouraged at JP. Feminism also serves to moderate some of the extremes of individualism that accompany some anarchist philosophy. As one newsletter author remarked, it was ‘good’ that nuns had been a part of the Catholic Worker movement as they helped to not only provide structure and direction but also to focus individual effort on care. Drawing on these anarchist and feminist Discourses, hospitality became a fluid term that I identify as meaning at times welcoming, other times engaging in social change, and finally as resisting quantification.
Hospitality as welcoming the homeless
For the workers at JP, engaging in hospitality meant, in part, providing a space for those most pushed to the side by the system and giving them a place where they felt welcome and valued. Workers informed me that providing this space was particularly important for women and their children who often struggled the most to find adequate support. One guest, a Black woman named Monique contrasted her experiences at JP with other shelters. When I asked her about her first day at JP she said she found it surprising; when I asked her to elaborate she said:
They were basically, they just care about the guests that actually stay here. I’m not saying that other shelters don’t, but sometimes it’s just like, you’re not, you’re not a name with a face. You’re just like the homeless person that just doesn’t matter, because a lot of people think like, being homeless, you’re lazy, you make bad decisions. Why don’t you go and get a job? And I’ve been working since I don’t know when and I’m still homeless. So . . . Yeah, it’s pretty different.
Monique’s reflection on how JP differed from other shelters was shared by other guests. For example, another guest, a Black woman named Peggy, stated that what made JP unique was that ‘they treat people like human beings and not like a number . . . We are all discarded when we lose our home, but they bring you in. You feel that you’re a part of more than just yourself.’ This welcoming is something many workers saw as central to providing hospitality. One worker, a white woman named Olivia, stated she saw the mission of JP as ‘providing a place for people that need it’ and she continued by stating ‘it’s really important that it doesn’t feel like a sterile shelter environment’.
This emphasis on creating a sense of home as opposed to a shelter was something that was widely embraced by the workers at MSF and was included in the intake materials at the house. On the page that housetakers read to new guests as they welcomed them to JP, the second paragraph read ‘we are more of a big crazy house than an agency’. Workers and volunteers took the contrast between JP and more traditional shelters seriously, occasionally correcting new volunteers, guests, and me when we used the term ‘shelter’ instead of ‘house’.
The importance of thinking of JP as a ‘house’ instead of a ‘shelter’ was also represented in how the guests were included in the decision-making process. While monthly meetings were used to discuss issues in the house with guests, most decisions were made by the workers at community meetings that were held on the third floor. At these meetings, the workers used consensus to make most of the house decisions, and while guest concerns were discussed in these meetings the guests themselves were absent. During observations, however, several workers discussed that they were replicating an implicitly racialized and classed hierarchy by largely excluding the guests at the house from participating in the decision making. After several community meetings, the workers in the house elected to further empower the guests at JP by ‘moving the meetings downstairs’ and include guests in the process. This move was seen as not only reinforcing the anti-racist and anti-authoritarian beliefs of the house but also as a way to encourage ownership and empowerment by the guests.
The anarcho-feminist understanding of hospitality as welcoming the homeless emerged through an often antagonistic understanding of how JP differed from other homeless service agencies. Workers, volunteers, and guests deliberately engaged in organizing practices that contrasted with those of ‘sterile’ shelters that were seen as part of the same system that created homelessness. Thus, organizing practice at JP sought to engage in a radical hospitality that not only empowered guests but also sought to engage in social change.
Hospitality as social change
Hospitality also provided the basis for social change through consciousness-raising efforts. When defining hospitality in her interview, one longtime worker, a white woman named Danielle, stated that she believed that the hospitality they provided was not only to the guests but also to the volunteers and housetakers by providing them an opportunity to deconstruct their privilege and build a more compassionate world. By extending the notion of hospitality to include the educational efforts, Danielle expands JP’s mission from only caring for the homeless to making systemic changes. These educational efforts can be seen as a consciousness-raising effort tied to a feminist Discursive understanding of JP’s social welfare IL. Danielle’s emphasis on the role that hospitality played in effecting social change was echoed by another worker, a white man named Edward. When I asked him what JP did to try to address systemic issues related to homelessness he responded:
I think that we have, like college groups come and we try to talk to them about the causes of homelessness and that capitalism is a part of that, and kind of systematic oppression and racism. A lot like other homeless shelters and nonprofits are not talking about those things as much. I mean it is something that we talk about, but I don’t know how much we’re . . . I mean, I think that we, as Catholic Workers, we like to think that activism and changing the status quo is part of what we do, but I think that it’s like an, it’s like a dream that a lot of us share but at least at-at Judy’s Place, that isn’t really . . . We don’t really do that together. We don’t really protest or, you know, think about ways to change the system together.
Edward’s response reflected both the importance of the hospitality and a sense of dissatisfaction that a few members of the community shared that the organization was not engaged in enough direct action. While many members of the community were involved in more direct action (e.g. some worked with the local Black Lives Matter protests), these protests were not coordinated at the community level.
This understanding of hospitality as a method through which to not only provide its guests with necessities but also to challenge the structures that caused homelessness drew many people to the shelter as volunteers and workers. For example, one man who brought his family to cook at the shelter stated that he liked how the organization’s website had talked about getting past the ‘poverty petting zoo’ that structures interactions between volunteers and those seeking services at other shelters. Another volunteer, who had been serving dinner at JP for several years, told me she stopped working at other shelters because they did not allow you to sit down and eat with the people you served. Many volunteers remained, at least initially, uncomfortable with sitting and eating with the guests. Monique reflected on how some volunteers were looking at her young daughter and talking about how cute she was as they stood by the table where the food was laid out to be served. Monique asked the women to come and eat with them and they initially declined. Later, however, they came and sat with Monique and one held her daughter while they talked and she ate.
The anarcho-feminist underpinnings of JP’s understanding of hospitality as social change can be understood in several ways. Most obviously, the use of consciousness-raising as a technique of changing perceptions of homelessness serves as an important starting point. However, a more subtle strategy of social change is the way that organizing practice at JP challenged normative charity models by inviting volunteers to eat with guests. While not all volunteers took advantage of the opportunity, many did and remarked on the transformative potential of coming to know other people. As one author remarked in a newsletter, hospitality like this creates the possibility that, while it would be impossible to know everyone in a city, it becomes possible to imagine every person as someone with whom they could live closely. He continued to argue that this understanding fundamentally reshaped the world.
Hospitality as an alternative to quantitative measures
Hospitality also served as a discursive resource to push back on quantitative measures of JP’s organizing practices. At times, tension manifested in terms of how the workers and guests thought about their work quantitatively. Several workers reflected on the fact that they could be, possibly, helping more people. When I asked one worker, a white man named Terry, what he thought the house could do better, he responded that ‘Some people would say that we should try and push people to move out, and even some former guests had expressed that we’re too nice to people sometimes.’ He continued that JP faced a tension between pushing its guests back into a system that the organization viewed as oppressive and providing help to those in need. He continued that:
If we can get more people in their own apartments then we can get the next person in here because there’s tons of need. . . . Maybe they could or would figure out what’s next if we were more like, ‘You have limited time here.’ And then we could take someone else in their place.
In his interview, Terry reflected both an acknowledgment that the house could help more people, but that doing so would involve making compromises that would clash with the organization’s anarcho-feminist organizing Discourses. While JP could help more people, doing so would, as Terry also stated in his interview, involve returning them to oppressive situations. As he put it, focusing on moving people quickly would require the workers to ‘push the guests to participate in [oppressive systems] in various ways. Like, you know “Go and get a shitty job.”’
This tension between providing hospitality and a quantitative lens came most sharply into focus when the workers, based on suggestions from the guests, stopped opening the house for lunches on weekdays to members of the homeless community in the area. Olivia reflected on her belief that the goal of the shelter was to provide a space that was as close to home as possible for people who needed space, and that mission clashed with programs that brought people who were not staying at JP fulltime. She continued:
I think that’s a good mission to have. I think it’s hard not to do the lunches because that was a great way to address the need of the population in the neighborhood that doesn’t regularly get a warm meal. But I also think those two collide, it’s hard to create this really warm home feeling when you’re opening your doors to anybody who shows up.
While workers and guests both acknowledged that it was hard to discontinue the program, they articulated that it was important to provide better care to the women in the house than to help more people poorly. In her interview, Danielle echoed Olivia’s sentiments about the decision to create a more ‘homelike’ environment by focusing on the women who stayed at the house.
Danielle also elaborated how the decision to discontinue the lunches was tied to a need to push back on the emphasis on quantity over quality:
I notice that same pull inside myself, too. Like, we should be doing more. But also, you know, being surrounded by this much need it’s hard to negotiate. It’s hard to say that what we do is enough, ever, but that doesn’t really move towards a joy-filled and sustainable life either.
Danielle’s comments reflect both a rejection of the normative influence on quantity, which external funders tend to value, for one that focuses on the quality of the care provided. She continued by arguing that services like the lunches, while they helped more people, prevented the organization from fulfilling its mission of providing hospitality.
Discussion
In this article, I have explored how two organizations that served the same population in the same city enacted different translations of a social welfare institutional logic. I have argued that the social welfare IL at MSF was rooted in the Discourses of paternalism and neoliberalism and was rendered intelligible for organizational members by translating it into the discursive resource of getting clients ‘back on track’. In contrast, JP drew on feminist and anarchist Discourse to translate the social welfare IL as ‘hospitality’.
Previous literature has explored the links between ILs and Discourses (e.g. Mutch, 2018) and the role of ILs in explaining organizational heterogeneity (e.g. Besharov and Smith, 2014). What had remained underexplored, however, was an analysis of how different Discourses could influence the same IL. In this article, I have argued that anarchist, feminist, neoliberal, and paternalist Discourses can function as the Discursive basis for the same IL. This Discursive perspective on ILs helps address what Lammers (2011) referred to as a lack of ‘empirical accessibility’ in ILs theorizing. By attending to the role of Discourse in the constitution of ILs at the organizational level, I seek to explicate and productively manage some of the ambiguities associated with the theoretical concept by providing an understanding of the source of those ambiguities, namely the presence of multiple (and at times contradicting) Discourses. While this article has examined how multiple Discourses have manifested in one IL, social welfare, future research can and should explore this issue by not only examining other ILs but also by examining how these multiple Discourses manifest through multiple ILs. While these future projects may not need to be comparative, I argue they may need to incorporate ethnographic methods to provide an empirical grounding that some ILs work (drawing on either survey, content analysis, or interviews) lacks.
A Discursive approach to understanding organizational heterogeneity via ILs is not meant to replace analysis of the interactions between ILs. Rather, the purpose of this article is to bring a perspective that encourages further nuance in that analysis. The first step in better articulating this relationship is by examining how abstracted Discourses are translated into more intelligible and grounded organizational practices. According to Pache and Santos (2013), a social welfare institutional logic is concerned with the provision of services to a marginalized population. What a Discursive framework adds to this understanding is how the organization makes sense of who receives services, what kind of services are offered, and, perhaps, most importantly, what the purpose of those services is. To align organizational activities, discursive resources are mobilized to maintain organizationally preferred understandings of ILs. At MSF, this manifested in the translation from a still relatively abstract notion of providing services to homeless women to an organizational mission of getting clients ‘back on track’.
For the staff at MSF, ‘back on track’ served as the primary discursive resource to make their part in the organization intelligible. Similarly, discursive resources related to providing structure and responsibility were drawn upon to support the organizational mission to get clients ‘back on track’. However, the available discursive resources were constrained by organizationally preferred understandings of what it meant to get clients on track. Central to this task is that individuals in these neoliberal societies take responsibility for transforming themselves into productive market actors. In interactions with the staff, any attempt by clients to discuss systemic barriers was dismissed as making excuses. Even with staff agreed with the clients, as exemplified by Bethany and other staff discussing behind closed doors about the trouble finding childcare, interactions with clients focused solely on taking responsibility and planning.
As Figure 1 shows, paternalism both complemented and complicated neoliberal attitudes. For example, the paternalistic translations of the social welfare IL could complement neoliberal translations by providing the disciplinary tools needed to (re)subjectify clients at MSF. However, tensions arose between neoliberal translations of the social welfare IL (which emphasized clients taking responsibility for themselves) and paternalist Discursive translation of the same logic (which was based on the belief that the clients could not be trusted to be responsible). The tension between neoliberal paternalism in the nonprofit organizing process may be primarily present in NPOs like MSF because of how homelessness is understood in the United States. However, the tension hints at how contradictions may arise not only between normative and alternative organizing Discourses but also between normative organizing Discourses within one organization.
Relationship between normative discourses and institutional logics.
In contrast, at JP the social welfare IL was translated into a primary guiding discursive resource of ‘hospitality’ that drew upon anarchist and feminist Discourses to inform it. For the workers, volunteers, and guests at JP hospitality oriented a number of practices. Hospitality served not only to guide how workers and volunteers sought to help create a place that did not ‘feel like a sterile shelter environment’, but also to engage in education efforts with the more privileged groups that came to the shelter. Finally, hospitality was used, somewhat ironically, to justify ending a practice that opened the house to a larger community. Ending the lunch program that had served many members of the homeless community in the area was done under an understanding of hospitality that was rooted in anarcho-feminist that emphasizes building stronger relationships and empowering the guests who stayed at the shelter. While some of the workers were reluctant to discontinue the program, the understanding of hospitality that emphasized closer relationships resulted in the ending of lunch service.
As seen in Figure 2, the anarcho-feminist organizing Discourses that guided the social welfare logic of hospitality were less prone to the tensions exemplified by practices such as insisting the clients take responsibility for themselves while limiting their capacity to do so. This is, perhaps, in part due to the awareness that some founding members of the organization had about the challenges of anarchism as a central organizing Discourse. In one newsletter article, the author reflected that the involvement of nuns in the Catholic Worker movement was important as they provided a response to the extreme individualism that anarchism could encourage. However, while not displayed in Figure 2, it is important to note the vestiges of paternalist Discourse that regularly challenged JP’s commitments to providing an alternative to a more normative shelter model. For example, like at MSF, guests at JP were largely removed from the running of the house. Both organizations also instituted a curfew for the women staying with them. While these differences are important to note, it is also worth reflecting that JP recognized these tensions and began to make changes, giving the guests keys to the house and changing the structure of meetings to include the guests in the process.
Relationship between alternative discourses and institutional logics.
What both of these examples show, I argue, is that while each organization had a primary discursive resource in the translation of the Discourses into the institutional logic, each organization also made use of secondary sets of discursive resources that were more closely connected to daily organizing praxis. At MSF, these secondary discursive resources took the form of an understanding of personal responsibility that was linked to neoliberalism and providing structure, which was linked to paternalism. Each of these discursive resources could be said to ‘stand’ on their own as they both emerge from practice, have impacts beyond their immediate use, and enable understanding of both past and future practices (Kuhn et al., 2008). However, I view them as subordinate to the discursive resource of ‘back on track’, which helps to productively maintain the tensions between the organizing Discourses of neoliberalism and paternalism.
Finally, one of the central areas of interest in institutional theory is how institutions maintain themselves, and how organizations, in turn, maintain themselves within an institutional field (e.g. Suddaby, 2010). Future research on organizational change from an ILs perspective may find an exploration of the role of tensions and contradictions that are foregrounded in this article productive. Researchers seeking to understand organizational or institutional change (or, for that matter, the lack of change) may benefit from an examination of the discursive resources that are and are not mobilized in daily organizing practice. Future work on ILs may benefit from a close examination of the ways in which casual conversations and apparently offhand comments may reify or challenge dominant institutionalized structures. Furthermore, this work may benefit from a deeper examination of how Discourse shifts across contexts (e.g. the discussion of childcare with clients versus with staff).
Practical implications
For both organizations, the decision to engage with or resist normative or alternative organizing Discourses carried with it a burden in the types of resources it could marshal. External funding agencies like HUD have preferred measurable outcomes that are more likely to result in receiving support. Thus, organizations like MSF that align their practices with agencies like HUD are granted access to greater financial resources. When I asked one administrator her thoughts on who they were supposed to help, she quickly responded that ‘We help who HUD tells us to help.’ While this surrenders flexibility in some ways, the financial support MSF received allowed them to provide myriad services. Although the financial resources that were provided through the quick turnaround of clients at shelters like MSF are incredibly important, more attention at both the governmental and organizational levels should attend to the consequences of policies like these. For example, another administrator named Wendy admitted to sending clients out before they were ready to show HUD they could meet their outcomes.
At JP, the greater flexibility provided by the lack of engagement with these kinds of resources came with its own price. Not only did JP lack access to the funds that could have provided greater services to the women it helped, but that lack of financial resources also incurred a heavy burden on the workers. During observations, several workers left the organization, leaving only a few currently in the house (with more on the way) at the time observations ended. Organizations that rely entirely on voluntary labor, particularly organizations that ask much of their volunteers like JP, must be cognizant of the mental wear and tear that such labor entails, as it can impact the sustainability of the organization.
Conclusion
This project has examined how organizational heterogeneity within an organizational field may be understood by using a Discursive approach to ILs. I have argued that underlying organizing Discourses result in differing translations of a social welfare institutional logic, which serves as a primary discursive resource to guide organizational practices. What is important to note is that the Discourses discussed in this article were not the only Discourses that could be argued for or were obviously present in the two organizations. For example, as I briefly discussed, paternalist Discourse manifested in the practices at JP. However, the Discourses discussed in this article do provide the primary foundation for the understanding of each organization’s social welfare institutional logic.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank John Lammers for his thoughtful advice on an earlier version of this article. I am also grateful to my participants, without whom this work would not be possible.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Peter R Jensen’s dissertation research received internal funding from the University of Missouri’s Rebecca Verser & Alumni Graduate Student Support Fund.
