Institutionalization in the Context of Institutional Pluralism: Politics as a Generative Process

Abstract

Institutionalizing a new organizational template in a pluralistic environment where multiple institutional logics coexist entails unique challenges where actors must negotiate conflict and carry out integrative and adaptive work. This paper examines how organizational actors in a large service sector trade union managed to craft integrative processes out of contentious processes in institutionalizing a new organizational template. Recently, renewed attention has focused on politics as a means through which integration is achieved in organizations under multiple institutional pressures. However, we know relatively little about how politics achieves organizational integration in pluralistic contexts. This paper sheds light on how successful institutionalization processes actually unfold in organizations. While extant literature on intra-organizational political processes has depicted politics mainly as a zero-sum game, findings in this study suggest that politics can be a generative process through which organizations adapt to changing conditions.

Keywords

institutionalization institutional pluralism negotiated order organizational politics

Organizations increasingly find themselves in environments where conflicting institutional logics influence their mandate (Pache & Santos, 2010). Trade unions, healthcare organizations, public schools and not-for-profit organizations are under pressure not only to fulfil social objectives but to do so efficiently. Institutionalizing a new organizational template in a pluralistic environment where multiple institutional logics coexist entails unique challenges that require actors to negotiate conflict and carry out integrative and adaptive work (Kraatz, 2009). Scholars agree that, unlike institutionalization processes in environments where a single institutional logic dominates and exerts isomorphic influences, institutionalizing new organizational templates in pluralistic environments necessitates political action. This paper examines how organizational actors in a large service sector union managed to craft integrative processes out of contentious processes in institutionalizing a new organizational template.

Since Elsbach and Sutton (1992, p. 700) proclaimed that ‘Institutional theory provides a useful but incomplete view of how organizations cope with conflicting, inconsistent demands,’ significant advances have been made in our understanding of organizational responses to multiple institutional pressures (Greenwood, Raynard, Kodeih, Micelotta, & Lounsbury, 2011; Kraatz & Block, 2008; Pache & Santos, 2010). Managing an organization where actors bear allegiances to different institutional logics in the environment presents a formidable task (Kraatz & Block, 2008, p. 255). Scholars have warned of paralysis or even organizational failure, particularly in situations where conflicting groups are equally powerful and where institutional logics influence perceptions about organizational goals (Pache & Santos, 2010). Unlike conventional assumptions about institutionalization involving routinized reciprocal interaction and taken-for-granted scripts, scholars such as Kraatz (2009, p. 70) have pointed out that institutionalization under pluralism will require organizational actors to carry out integrative, adaptive and developmental work. Recently, renewed attention has focused on politics as a means through which integration is achieved in organizations under multiple institutional pressures (Greenwood et al., 2011; Kraatz & Block, 2008; Stryker, 2000). However, we know relatively little about how politics achieves organizational integration in pluralistic contexts. Based on historical data from an American trade union, I show how negotiated settlements between opposing groups that varied in nature and over time helped stabilize the organization and institutionalized a new organizational template based on a social movement logic. Proponents’ stance in intra-organizational politics became stronger as field-level acceptance of the new organizational template grew. The findings from this study address a recent call for researching ‘why structures and practices are made to appear legitimate or how elements of the broader social environment become manifest and elaborated inside organizations’ (Suddaby, Elsbach, Greenwood, Meyer, & Zilber, 2010, p. 1234). This paper sheds light on a hitherto poorly understood question – how successful institutionalization processes actually unfold in organizations. While extant literature on intra-organizational political processes has depicted politics mainly as a zero-sum game, the present findings contribute to re-conceptualizing politics as a generative process through which organizations adapt to changing conditions.

Organizational Responses to Institutional Pluralism

Institutional pluralism is defined as the presence of more than one dominating logic in the environment, generating multiple institutionally given identities and mythologies that legitimate organizations (Kraatz & Block, 2008, p. 244). I define institutional logics as practices, beliefs and rules guiding an institutional order and providing actors with vocabularies of motive and sense of self (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Thornton & Ocasio, 2008). These logics are available to individuals, groups and organizations to further elaborate and use to their own advantage (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008, p. 101). Hence, logics are ‘embodied in practices, sustained and reproduced by cultural assumptions, and political struggles’ (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008, p. 101). Pluralism can generate incompatible prescriptions for organizational action (Greenwood et al., 2011), as well as competition among groups that profess allegiances to different institutional logics (Kraatz & Block, 2008; Marquis & Lounsbury, 2007). At the level of the organizational field contradictions between logics have been considered transitional, typically resulting in ‘shifts’ produced by one dominant logic replacing another (Dunn & Jones, 2010). Recently, however, it has been suggested that multiple institutional pressures on organizations may be a more lasting phenomenon: globalization and technological change have made it increasingly important for organizations to combine social objectives with efficiency imperatives, for example (O’Mahony & Bechky, 2008).

A growing stream of research has addressed how organizations respond to institutional pluralism. An organization’s response to multiple institutional pressures is crucial for establishing legitimacy vis-a-vis internal and external stakeholders, in turn affecting access to resources, and even organizational survival (Greenwood et al., 2011). Contrary to theoretical assumptions at the field level, studies at the organizational level have found the coexistence of contrasting logics to be enduring. This has been shown to be especially true in sectors such as healthcare, education and public services where organizations pursue multiple goals and where different occupational groups work side by side. Crafting integrative processes out of contentious processes is essential, since ‘The pluralistic organization does not automatically hold itself together’ (Kraatz & Block, 2008, p. 263). Challenges include establishing legitimacy with multiple social systems, dealing with internal conflict in decision making, and managing the tension between being committed to organizational history and being responsive to environmental pressures (Kraatz & Block, 2008). Thus, organizational actors operating in pluralistic environments cannot merely enact taken-for-granted scripts and are compelled to exercise choice (Kraatz, 2009; Pache & Santos, 2010, p. 461; Seo & Creed, 2002).

Increasingly, scholars have been concerned with the construction of organizational identity as a way of dealing with institutional complexity (Pratt & Foreman, 2000; Rao, Monin, & Durand, 2003). But the question of how organizations construct integrated organizational identities amid institutional pluralism is still not adequately understood (Greenwood et al., 2011, p. 352) as empirical studies have been rare. One exception is Battilana and Dorado (2010), who found that successful integration was brought about when members were strongly socialized into an organizational identity that blended contrasting institutional logics. However, the organization studied by Battilana and Dorado (2010) relied on the recruitment of employees with no prior work experience, which is less feasible for established organizations in highly institutionalized fields. Scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the importance of political action in managing multiple institutional pressures (Greenwood et al., 2011; Kraatz & Block, 2008; Pache & Santos, 2010). Group contests for status and power are a key mechanism by which actors enact institutional logics (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008), and become especially salient in pluralistic conditions (Greenwood et al., 2011). Studies have shown that the adoption of new organizational templates affects the balance of power, personal commitments and professional obligations of organizational actors (Binder, 2007; Gouldner, 1954; Hallett & Ventresca, 2006). Kraatz and Block (2008, pp. 261–2) cite politics as the means by which organizations develop as a ‘self’ (Selznick, 1957), but note that research has not examined political processes in such a light, stating that ‘the examination of such integrative processes poses a particularly important opportunity for future research’. Thus, the research question pursued here is: How do organizational actors construct integrated organizational identities in institutionalizing new templates under pluralism? The paper aims to contribute to understanding the ‘intra-organizational conflict and strategic work involved in building, sustaining and changing institutions’ (Kraatz, Ventresca, & Deng, 2010, p. 1522) by constructing a process-based model of intra-organizational institutionalization in the face of multiple institutional pressures.

Institutional Analysis of Intra-Organizational Politics

Friedland and Alford (1991, p. 256) early on reclaimed the importance of politics in institutional theory by stating that ‘Institutional contradictions are the bases of the most important political conflicts in our society; it is through these politics that the institutional structure of society is transformed.’ Scholars recently have begun to theorize organizational politics as a dynamic link to broader political processes at the institutional level (Kraatz & Block, 2008; Stryker, 2000). In Stryker’s (2000, p. 180) words, ‘organizational politics is key to how an organization’s internal and external environment interrelate because organizational politics reflect and shape what new institutionalists call institutional politics’. Such a perspective of organizational politics intricately connects it to strategies of legitimation and digresses sharply from traditional conceptualizations of organizational politics as a mobilization of resources and power (Hickson, 1986; Pettigrew, 1973; Pfeffer, 1981; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). Hitherto, interests, rather than values and perceptions, have been theorized as the driving force for politics (Hardy & Clegg, 2006, p. 738). Consequently, organizational politics has often been construed as the act of subjugating opposing forces through the use of power (Pfeffer, 1981, p. 71).

By contrast, scholars studying organizational responses to pluralism have recognized that organizational politics must engage in legitimating new institutional logics: ‘When one set of taken-for-granted beliefs confronts an alternative one, “legitimacy politics” are likely to ensue within the organization’ (Kraatz & Block, 2008, p. 254). Contrary to neo-institutional theory’s emphasis on cultural and cognitive mechanisms of governance (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991; Friedland & Alford, 1991), scholars have argued that legitimation politics in pluralistic conditions must involve the use of organizational rules and structures (Kraatz & Block, 2008, p. 254). Although studies have shown that actors engage in rhetorical strategies of legitimation to endorse new organizational templates (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005), virtually no empirical study has shown how organizational rules and structures are utilized to institutionalize new organizational templates.

Recent efforts to conceptualize organizational arrangements under multiple institutional pressures have focused on interactional outcomes. In particular, the concept of negotiated orders, defined as localized social orders established through dynamic interaction among actors, has been borrowed from the tradition of symbolic interactionism (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006; Strauss, 1978). It is presumed that institutional logics are translated into organizational practices and rules through the competitive interaction of groups that carry contending logics (Bechky, 2006; Kaghan & Lounsbury, 2011; Nelsen & Barley, 1997). However, little is known about how group contests construct negotiated orders and what propels settlements to change over time. Moreover, despite scholarship in institutional logics explicitly acknowledging that actors are embedded in local and extra-local institutions (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006; Kaghan & Lounsbury, 2011, p. 74; Kraatz & Block, 2008), how organizational processes of social order construction are linked with dynamics at the field level has been under-theorized.

Institutional Logics in the Service Employees International Union

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was founded in 1921 as a loose network of occupational unions that represented residential janitors and workers in other low-wage service occupations. In its early history the union struggled financially and had little power over employers (Beadling, Cooper, & Palladino, 1984). For several decades the union manifested a decentralized structure where local unions were highly autonomous (Piore, 1994). The rapid expansion of the union into two relatively new sectors, healthcare and public services, and the influx of labour activists from these sectors ushered in a period of innovation in the union beginning in the 1960s. In the 1980s the SEIU was one of the first unions to adopt social movement practices, which triggered large-scale organizational change in the ensuing years (Manheim, 2001). Changes brought on by the adoption of a social movement logic met with strong internal resistance.

Starting from the late 1970s until the late 1990s two institutional logics – that of occupations and that of social movements – coexisted and conflicted in the union. The eventual institutionalization of a new organizational template, a ‘social movement unionism’ (SMU) template, in effect also institutionalized elements of a bureaucratic logic. Thus, the resulting organizational form mixed social movement and bureaucratic logics.

The occupational logic in unions dates back to the medieval guilds. In the United States, unions operating under the occupational logic have been found as early as the 1700s (Commons, 1921). Occupational unions seek work control, often monopolizing the supply of labour through hiring halls and enforcing craft standards as gate-keeping mechanisms (Weber, 1963). These unions see themselves foremost as an occupational community. Their primary focus of attention is on representing union members, which they see as crucial to growing and maintaining order in the occupational community. Organizing of new members is carried out conservatively and undertaken within statutory organizing methods prescribed by American labour laws. Occupational unions are known for local self-governance and bottom-up decision making. Historically, unions in the craft occupations have adopted the occupational logic, as in the case of the Carpenters, a builder and construction workers’ union, and the Teamsters, a union representing long-haul drivers.

A social movement logic existed earlier in the history of American unionism but has recently been revived by reformist unions such as the SEIU (Fantasia & Stepan-Norris, 2004). Unions adopting the social movement logic see themselves as vehicles for social justice (Fantasia & Voss, 2004; Manheim, 2001). They aim to create movement-like momentum across entire markets and to gather power within whole industries (Fantasia & Voss, 2004). In contrast to the local self-governance of occupational unions, unions adopting the social movement logic are governed through campaign networks. The overwhelming priority in these unions is organizing new members rather than representing existing ones, as organizing is seen as a means of changing the power structure between workers and employers. Compared to occupational unions which operate within the established institutional framework of industrial relations, social movement unions favour the use of extra-institutional resources, such as public protest (Chun, 2005). Typically social movement unions can be found among low-wage service workers, such as janitorial workers, represented by the SEIU, and hotel and restaurant workers, represented by UNITE-HERE. Table 1 compares the two institutional logics in their ideal typical forms according to their mission, organizational identity, focus of attention, and governance and decision-making structures (Thornton, 2002; Thornton, Jones, & Kury, 2005). In the rest of the paper I distinguish between the ‘social movement logic’ as an institutional logic and ‘social movement unionism (SMU)’ as the actual organizational form (Greenwood & Hinings, 1993) that SEIU developed as the social movement logic was institutionalized within it. SMU therefore includes concrete practices, rules and structures that embodied the institutional logic (Table 1).

Table 1.

Competing institutional logics in the labour movement

	Occupational logic	Social movement logic
Mission	Work control	Social change
Organizational identity	Union as occupational community	Union as vehicle for social change
Organizing field	Occupation	Industry
Focus of attention	Representation of existing members	Organizing of non-members
Strategy for organizing	Organize within geographic boundaries	Organize across geographic boundaries
Decision-making process	Bottom-up	Bottom-up
Governance	Local self-governance	Campaign networks
Typical context	Services (craft occupations)	Services (low-wage occupations)

As mentioned, in later phases the SEIU also institutionalized elements of the bureaucratic logic of unionism, particularly top-down decision-making processes and centralized governance structures. The bureaucratic logic has been associated with the vast majority of American unions historically; however, it had thus far not characterized the SEIU (Piore, 1994). The bureaucratic union aims for job control, typically at the level of the enterprise. It sees itself primarily as a vehicle for workers’ economic advancement, shunning involvement in political or social causes. Bureaucratic unions are associated with top-down decision-making structures and governance through a centralized federation. In the course of adopting the SMU template, the SEIU moved from periphery to centre of the labour movement. The labour movement is a mature and stable field, with a centralized structure embodied by the AFL-CIO, a national federation. Labour laws and well-established institutions of collective bargaining govern union operations (Barbash, 1984). The introduction of the social movement logic revealed limitations in existing institutional arrangements and caused rapid institutional change in this field (Fantasia & Voss, 2004), culminating in the secession of seven unions from the AFL-CIO in 2005. The SEIU played a key role in disseminating the new template and legitimizing it within the labour movement and among its stakeholders. It was the unmistakable leader of the secessionist movement out of the AFL-CIO and the creation of an alternative federation whose members adhered to the social movement logic (Fletcher & Gapasin, 2008). As of 2011, the SEIU is the second-largest union in the US, with 2.1 million members. Campaigns of the SEIU, such as Justice for Janitors, have become iconic emblems of how the social movement logic has revived unionization, galvanized coalitions between labour and community groups, and built linkages with overseas labour movements (Erickson, Fisk, Milkman, Mitchell, & Wong, 2002).

Internally, SEIU is governed as a federated association of local unions that delegate authority and pay dues to the national union. The top governing body of the union is the International Executive Board (IEB), convened every four years to ratify key organizational decisions.¹ Each local union has its own Executive Board, representatives from which sit on the IEB. The day-to-day operation of both the national and local unions is performed by elected executives and staff. The SEIU is known for the quality of its staff (Piore, 1994), who are salaried and typically work full-time. Members of the union pay monthly dues to the union and benefit from the services and legal protection that the union provides.

Method

Case studies are suited for theory-building on institutional and organizational change because they involve concepts – such as power, interests and conflict – that are difficult to measure, typically take place over a period of time, and are products of iterative processes (Greenwood & Hinings, 1996, p. 1047). The selection of the SEIU and the labour movement to study intra-organizational processes of institutionalization in the face of multiple institutional pressures has several advantages. Unionization has declined for decades and, since the 1980s, the crisis in existing labour institutions has challenged institutional logics and revived dormant logics in the American labour movement (Fantasia & Voss, 2004; Manheim, 2001). SEIU as a case provides a rare instance where a new template was successfully institutionalized despite opposition from a powerful and committed group (Pache & Santos, 2010). Furthermore, the SEIU’s role as an institutional entrepreneur in spearheading the social movement logic has been well documented (Clawson, 2003; Manheim, 2001), allowing the researcher to connect field-level and organizational-level institutionalization processes.

Data collection

Four types of data were inspected as part of this study: archival documents, field observations, interviews, and secondary material on the SEIU and the American labour movement. The primary source of historical data came from various collections of the SEIU official archives housed at the Wayne State University, including the Executive Office, the Executive Board, the SEIU Conventions, the Research Department and the Organizing Department collections. Documents available included meeting minutes, internal memoranda, communications between national and local unions, strategic plans, and internal and external reports. Archival data reviewed included records from the early 1980s when SEIU adopted SMU practices up to the latest year that archival data was available, 2000. This data was analysed for the intra-organizational dynamics of adopting and institutionalizing the social movement logic.

Field observations and interviews were conducted between 2005 and 2007. These data were interpreted to understand ‘later stage institutional change’ during which stable arrangements emerged from previously chaotic inter-group contestations (Seo & Creed 2002, p. 243). Data for this period consisted of observations and interviews conducted as part of a dissertation project. Six full-time months equivalent observations were carried out in four local unions (Boston, Houston, Los Angeles and Washington D.C.) of the SEIU’s building services sector and at the national union in Washington D.C. Events observed included meetings, protests, social events and informal gatherings. In each local union the author’s research was approved by the relevant authority, usually the president. The author also spent long hours on the road with staff and members of the union, during which informal conversations proved valuable in calibrating interview and observational data. Of 162 total interviews completed for the dissertation project, 26 were analysed in full for this paper. These 26 interviews were conducted with individuals who had been with the union since before 1995 and had, to various degrees, participated in the change process. They focused on understanding the role that each participant played in organizational change and his or her motivations. The rest of the interviews were culled – only the parts of the interviews that contained interviewees’ views of the union, its work and its position within the labour movement were analysed. Most interviews were tape-recorded; in the few cases where interviewees preferred it, hand-written notes were taken and transcribed within 24 hours.

Finally, secondary material on the SEIU and the American labour movement were examined in order to assess field-level institutionalization of the social movement logic. In addition to overall scholarly work in this area, key articles in a leading practitioner journal in the American labour movement, the New Labor Forum, and a newspaper with balanced coverage of the labour movement, the New York Times, were examined. Articles that matched the search for keywords ‘social movement union’ and ‘SEIU’ between 1980 and 2007 were included.

Data analysis

Due to the variety of data, multiple analytical steps were carried out. As a first step, temporal bracketing (Langley, 1999) was employed in order to understand the phases of change and the corresponding processes of institutionalization. Subsequently, content analysis was administered on data depicting political actions and settlements of group contestations.

Process data include events and developments that unfold at different rates, often overlap with each other, and sometimes do not have a fixed ending (Langley, 1999, pp. 692–3). Temporal bracketing, or the separating of longitudinal process data into analytically identifiable, mutually dependent phases, has been recommended (Langley, 1999) and effectively used to analyse intra-organizational change (e.g. Fox-Wolfgramm, Boal, & Hunt, 1998). Temporal bracketing was used here to analyse similarities and differences in processes of institutionalization across historical phases in the union. Focus was placed on identifying ‘disruptive events’ (Hoffman, 1999), such as political battles and introduction of new rules, practices and structures, and organizational actors’ reactions to these events. Two distinct phases were identified from archival data. The first phase demarcated a period of ‘radical’ change in the SEIU that brought about breaks with earlier practices and structures (Greenwood & Hinings, 1993, 1996), and lasted from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. Following initial adoption, a latter phase lasting from the early 1990s to the early 2000s saw more incremental changes and the construction of a unified organizational identity (Table 2).

Table 2.

Timeline of events during institutionalization

Chronology	Nature of change	Intra-organizational events	Field-level events
1970s	Pre-change	Union hires activists from outside who begin experimenting with SMU practices	De-unionization accelerates in building services. Union remains in the periphery of the field but attracts affiliations from public services employees associations
1980s	Radical change	National union adopts industry division structure Local unions host campaigns sponsored by national union. Conflict ensues between local staff and national staff Elected local union executives are deposed from the helm of important local unions for oppositional activities	SEIU forms alliances with religious, anti-poverty and community organizations. It expands its reach in state and national level politics
Late 1980s–2000	Incremental change	1992: Industry structure is ratified as principle for restructuring local unions	Union gains affiliations of two other powerful unions in healthcare. Experiences largest membership gain in its history
		Mergers between local unions result in ‘mega locals’. Representative structures are reduced as a whole	1995: Former SEIU President John Sweeney accedes to AFL CIO Presidency. Start of SEIU’s leadership in labor movement
2005–2007	Institutionalized state	Organizing campaigns become routinized; union expands into the South2000: Taxation by national union is further increased to strengthen strategic campaigns	2005: SEIU leads seven unions in a secession from AFL CIO; founds Change to WinUnion expands global partnerships

Data on political actions conducted by groups in the union were coded in sequence (Miles & Huberman, 1994). First-order themes (Van Maanen, 1979) were identified, typically comprising phrases that described specific actions and reactions, or common dialogical patterns among the actors. This was followed by axial coding where the relationships between coded items were identified and labelled as second-order themes (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Second-order themes explained what first-order themes meant or clarified the purpose behind certain actions. Finally, I clustered second-order themes into aggregate dimensions of political actions that could be used for theory-building. The data structure (Corley & Gioia, 2004) for political actions taken by proponents of the social movement logic is presented as Figure 1 and that for political actions undertaken by opponents is presented as Figure 2.

Figure 1.

Data structure for political actions by proponents

Figure 2.

Data structure for political actions by opponents

Two types of outcomes were analysed. Differences and similarities in the nature of inter-group contestations for status and power across the temporal phases were coded and interpreted as an outcome of institutionalization processes. Following Hallett and Ventresca’s (2006) definition of ‘negotiated social orders’ as couplings of formal organizational practices with one or more of the competing institutional logics, I determined inter-group settlements in each phase by the extent to which organizational practices were coupled with either the occupational logic or the social movement logic in the initial phase, and in later phases, with the logic of bureaucracy.

In order to build a process model of institutionalization from a multi-level perspective (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008, p. 106), I connected intra-organizational developments with field-level dynamics for each phase. Two key developments were followed at the level of the American labour movement: the legitimacy of the social movement logic as measured by the rate of its adoption by individual unions and by national federations for labour, and the SEIU’s own standing in the labour movement.

Institutionalization of the Social Movement Union Template

Groups in the SEIU and institutional logics

Three relevant groups in the union became apparent during the author’s fieldwork and were later confirmed in archival data. The groups’ different backgrounds, task areas and connections to external communities meant that they espoused clearly distinguishable interests and commitments to occupational and social movement logics. Although differences existed in the scope of authority and range of political actions taken by top executives and national staff, I grouped them together as ‘proponents’ for the purposes of theorizing political action. Their political actions are presented in Figure 1. Local staff held allegiances to the occupational union logic and opposed the social movement logic, at least up until the 1990s. The political actions they undertook as opponents are presented in Figure 2. The three groups’ respective allegiances with the available institutional logics, and their interests and backgrounds are explained below.

Top executives oversaw operations in all three sectors of the union – building services, healthcare and public services. They typically started out as union members but quickly climbed the administrative ranks of the union. Due to SEIU’s legacy of decentralized governance, top executives have always enjoyed a large discretion that allowed them to focus on strategic initiatives (Piore, 1994). Top executives were not only acutely aware of the threat that de-unionization presented the union, but also of the opportunities that the social movement logic provided for external legitimacy and growth. Top executives orchestrated overall organizational change needed to implement the SMU template. However, their relationship to the social movement logic appeared to be relatively instrumental. They often only actioned key decisions at the more impassioned behest of national staff.

In the 1970s and 1980s the SEIU increased outside recruitment of national staff experienced in labour, community and student activism. These new staff were hired as organizers and given liberty in experimenting with new practices. These staff tended to harbour impatience with existing organizing practices which they believed were recipes for failure – they heavily favoured strategic corporate campaigns following the social movement logic (Manheim, 2001). National staff identified both with organizing as an occupational identity and with SMU as a vision for the SEIU.

Together, top executives and national staff as proponents utilized the union’s democratic process to change practices and rules, theorized the historical imperativeness of SMU, legitimized it in terms of organizational survival, infused new rules and structures with values, and, at later stages of change, edited organizational history to remove traces of intense conflict (see Figure 1 and detailed explanation in the following section).

Staff in local unions believed that de-unionization occurred as a result of forces outside their control and not as a result of their actions or lack thereof. As a group they had vested interests in the relationships and structures established under occupational unionism. They thus resisted the adoption of new structures and practices, regarding them as an intrusion on the tradition of local autonomy and ways of doing things. They also expressed moral reservation about SMU organizing strategies that they believed relied more on pressuring employers instead of on cultivating workplace activism. As local staff lost their control over organizing, they came to identify increasingly with representation as an occupational identity. This group’s relationship to the social movement logic changed, however, as SMU became more institutionalized. A combination of political purging, recruitment of activists sympathetic to the social movement logic, and normative pressure saw this group acquiesce in new realities. In later stages of institutionalization, opponents reframed new practices and structures in terms of old values, stating, for example, that SMU improved member representation because it increased the union’s market power (see Figure 1).

Findings are presented for each of the three phases – radical change, incremental change and institutionalized state – in terms of critical events at both institutional and intra-organizational levels, political actions undertaken by organizational actors, and outcomes, which include inter-group contestations and negotiated orders. These findings are summarized in two figures and two tables: Table 2 shows a timeline of events, Figures 1 and 2 represent data structures for political actions undertaken by proponents and opponents respectively, and Table 3 summarizes the changing nature of inter-group contestations and emergent social orders.

Table 3.

Outcomes of intra-organizational institutionalization

Phases	Nature of inter-group contestation	Emergent social order
Radical change	Contestation over practices	Social movement logic ascendant but meets with resistanceOccupational logic slowly decoupled with formal practices
Incremental change	Contestation over rules and systems	Social movement logic used to justify introduction of bureaucratic practice and centralized structures
Institutionalized state	Tacit agreements replace overt contestation	Institutionalization of both social movement and bureaucratic logics. Organizational identity solely recognizes social movement logic

Phase I (1980s): radical change

Critical events

In the mid to late-1970s the SEIU was besieged with de-unionization in its building services sector due to contracting out and shift and part-time work eroding the union’s base. At the same time, the union faced new opportunities in public employment and healthcare, where limitations on workers’ rights to join unions had recently been lifted. Despite its relatively low status in the field, the SEIU was the beneficiary of many affiliations with existing employee associations, resulting in large membership growth. The influx of new members and activists from sectors that had started to experiment with social movement practices (Johnston, 1994) launched SEIU’s period of radical change.

During the 1970s, the national union hired activists from outside the union who began experimenting with SMU practices. As these experiments resulted in ground-breaking success, they were expanded into large-scale campaigns. In 1984 the national union underwent restructuring to adopt ‘industry divisions’. Restructuring of local unions was attempted in the 1980s but proved unsuccessful due to widespread opposition. Increasing incidences of conflict between national and local staff were reported during this phase. Political battles ensued, whereby the national union manoeuvred local elections to depose local union executives who were opposed to reforms.

Political actions

Sources of conflict between local and national staff included differences in beliefs, values, and status and territorial concerns. Logics espoused were perceived to be incompatible by the actors involved. Each party sought to remedy the incompatibility by trying to ‘eliminate’ the person in question from the task and thereby undermine the institutional logic carried by the opponent (Pache & Santos, 2010, p. 456). A memo to members of the IEB from a staff member of the Denver local union detailed a typical interaction between local and national staff during an organizing campaign:

Local union Representative (author of memo):

The workers at [Company A] voted to strike 17 to 1. We are going to obtain permission from the officers and the executive board.

National union organizer:

I won’t allow you to strike.

Local union representative:

And who are you?

National union organizer:

Why are you so defiant?

Local union representative:

Why are you so insensitive to the workers’ problems and needs?

National union organizer:

I’m going to remove you from this.

Local union representative:

Well, that’s up to the workers and the executive board.

(SEIU Executive Office Collection, 9 January 1987)

Top executives actively promoted the union’s role in national affairs, for example, by participating in the AFL-CIO committees and policy advisory boards. Internally, top executives made the final decisions pertaining to organizational change. They justified the national union’s increased involvement in organizing both as a strategic investment as well as a measure for survival. The national president’s report to the 1988 SEIU Convention, for example, framed reforms as the union’s response to new threats in the environment: ‘The increasing presence of multinational corporations with their seemingly limitless resources and professional union-busters as our opponents makes it clear that the International must take a new and vigorous role in organizing efforts’ (SEIU International Convention Collection, 1984).

Top executives justified the new industrial division structure as a ‘central point of coordination and direction’ for strategic campaigns in each sector. As the national director of organizing explained it, ‘Communality of purpose will naturally require agreement on the part of participating locals to accept a central point of coordination and direction, the International’ (SEIU Organizing Department collection, 22 October 1985).

National staff carried out the day-to-day activities to promote and implement the social movement logic. In doing so they agitated for attention from the top and lobbied for more resources and control. For example, a plea by a national organizer invoked the threat of widespread failure if timely resources were not committed to an ongoing campaign in Washington D.C.: ‘If we are not to do this [put resources into organizing campaign in Washington D.C.] I cannot honestly recommend that we will have any success in commercial organizing’ (SEIU Executive Office Collection, 13 April 1987). National staff pointed to local resistance to advocate for more, not less, change. They emphasized the futility of trying to engage and educate local union staff. Local staff were often portrayed, as in a memo by a national organizer working on a campaign in Atlanta, as unable to ‘come up with rational input’ and having a destructive effect on campaigns:

I have tried my best to make [president of local union A] comfortable with this campaign, especially during this last stage. Her sporadic involvement with the campaign made it extremely difficult for me to keep her fully informed and for her to come up with rational input concerning the campaign. … [President of local union A] stood up at a luncheon, that the International was paying for, and in essence accused us of blowing the campaign. (SEIU Executive Office Collection, 18 February 1990)

Subsequent memos to top executives argued that lack of cooperation from a particular local union called for its reorganization:

In reviewing the JfJ [Justice for Janitors] organizing campaign and the ongoing work necessary to continue organizing, enforcing our gains and building a strong union with credibility, there must be a reorganization in [Local Union A]. Since the beginning of the organizing campaign in May we have had to contend with and try and overcome hostility, distrust and apathy from [Local Union A] members and a confrontational or hostile relationship with the employers. (SEIU Executive Office Collection, 31 December 1986)

Because inter-group conflict during campaigns formed the basis of judgements on the union’s needs for new rules and structures, campaigns like the Justice for Janitors were coined as ‘most valuable in reforming local [unions]’ (SEIU Organizing Department collection, 1990). A memo written by a senior national staff who was deployed to diagnose the Denver local after a contentious campaign there pronounced: ‘We need to build an entirely new Local, top to bottom – side to side!’ (SEIU Executive Office Collection, 3 February 1987).

Although relatively scarce, the archives also contained reports from local staff. Local staff lobbied top executives to retain control over campaigns and resources and to stop the undermining of local authority. For example, one letter to the national president by a group of local staff in Atlanta deplored national organizers’ avoidance of working with local talent:

To deny the Atlanta Local leadership to have the opportunity to have ‘direct’ input into the entire process, clearly exhibits total disrespect and a lack of communication … By virtue of [Local Union X] leadership being from Atlanta would give SEIU an extraordinary advantage by having people who are knowledgeable of the surroundings and that could interact with the perspective of workers. (SEIU Executive Office Collection, 15 February 1990)

Local staff at times vilified national staff. A group of staff and members in Denver made allegations of procedural injustice, charging national organizers with ‘discrimination, extortion, conspiracy, and violations of [Local Union N] by-laws and NLRB law’:

Since the Executive Board decides policy and procedure from the staff, we would appreciate your analysis and direction in solving these serious problems. These grievances contain accusations of discrimination, extortion, conspiracy, and violations of [Local Union N] by-laws and NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] law. Unfortunately, more grievances have been filed and will be sent to you in the near future. (SEIU Executive Office Collection, undated)

Thus, local staff advanced an alternative theorization of possible changes in the union based on local knowledge and due process.

Outcomes

The SMU template in this phase was implemented mostly through organizing campaigns, and thus inter-group contestations revolved around control over practices. The social movement logic was associated with successful campaigns and regained membership; hence, it was the ascendant logic in Phase I. A gradual coupling of formal practices with the social movement logic and a decoupling over time of formal practices with the occupational logic could be observed. However, during much of Phase I, confusion and uncertainty over strategies and practices persisted, ensuing in an overlap of occupational and social movement logics. Experimental practices created high task and role ambiguity. In a memorandum, a senior national officer suggested that a socialized division between existing and newly recruited staff in local unions made roles non-interchangeable and incurred high costs:

Each of these locals can be seen to be overstaffed in one way or another. Often, it is that there are too many service reps for the current membership. At the same time there are new staff members hired to do organizing. It is rare that the local has been able to convert a service rep to an organizer under the new types of projects we help locals create. Consequently, the local faces an extremely high staff cost. I think it is too easy for the local and the International to underestimate the costs of changing the nature of a local union. (SEIU Organizing Department collection, 23 June 1990)

Each local union harboured uneasy truces between occupational and social movement logics, in most cases until elections installed leaders who unambiguously supported the SMU template (Voss & Sherman, 2000). Increasingly, national staff called on top executives for systematic changes that would provide longer-term solutions. As one memo by a national organizer pleaded: ‘We keep getting called in to clean up the same problem, and spending large amounts of local and International money to paper over these difficulties instead of teaching how to cure them’ (SEIU Organizing Department collection, 24 March 1987).

Phase II (late 1980s–2000): incremental change

Critical events

The SEIU experienced the largest growth in membership in its history during the 1990s (22nd SEIU International Convention Proceedings, 2000). Mergers with two powerful associations in healthcare indicated the union’s growing status in the field. During this period the SMU model was adopted by other service sector unions and found acceptance in the American labour movement as a whole. The rise of John Sweeney, the former SEIU president who championed social movement unionism, to the presidency of the AFL-CIO in 1995 formally marked the end of the SEIU’s status as a peripheral union and the start of its leadership (Fletcher & Gapasin, 2008, pp. 128–9). A new national union president, Andy Stern, was elected from among national staff, a person who embodied the impassioned commitment to the social movement logic characteristic of his group.

In 1992, industry structure was ratified as a principle for reorganizing local unions. Under the motto ‘one union with many faces’, local union structures were overhauled to mimic the divisional structure of the national union, resulting in myriad mergers that redrew the jurisdictional line between locals. A system of rewards and sanctions, and with it a monitoring system, was introduced to police implementation. Starting from the late 1990s, a second round of mergers among local unions reduced representative structures in the union as a whole.

Political actions

Proponents worked hard to instil stability after turmoil. Unlike Phase I when coercion was not uncommon in high-conflict situations, rules and systems were invoked to manage group relationships. New rules and systems were justified in terms of the necessity to reduce discrepancy in structures between national and local unions and build an organizational identity to which members could relate. Political resistance continued to brew, particularly in those local unions that experienced their SMU campaigns relatively late. But formal political resistance began to fade away, not least because some local unions were placed into receivership by the national union.

In response to strong lobbying by senior national staff, top executives advocated for a restructure of local unions until the IEB ratified a resolution to that effect. The national president legitimized this new initiative as a continuation of the 1984 restructuring of the national union that promoted a unified organizational identity: ‘Just as our strength lies in our diversity, our challenge lies in creating an organizational identity which rings true for our wide range of members. From this challenge, the idea of industry-based divisions within SEIU was born’ (SEIU International Convention Collection, 1988).

Top executives framed the meaning of new structures to emphasize both unity and diversity. A memo entitled ‘Convention theme ideas’ that was circulated prior to the 1992 SEIU Convention revealed careful deliberation around these themes: ‘In all of this we need to re-enforce the fact that we are One Union with Many Faces. We need to weave the diverse elements of our union into one great tapestry, celebrating the pieces and the whole’ (SEIU International Convention Collection, 5 April 1991).

National staff instigated action from top executives, theorized the necessity of ongoing change, and designed and implemented new systems in Phase II. They prompted continued action from top executives by invoking urgency and stressing the incompleteness of reforms. Citing risks of political instability, they recommended that top union officers introduce deeper measures that would increase national union control over local unions. As stated in a memorandum to the union president:

We have added scores of new locals and new local leaders, many from already existing organizations with their own culture and way of doing things. The relationship between the International and the local has changed substantially. Local leaders see the International as complex and sometimes confused. There are numerous structures and sub-structures. Many of these structures overlap. … All these changes come at a time of growing political instability. (SEIU Organizing Department collection, 22 October 1991)

National staff theorized continued reforms as an historical imperative, not just for the SEIU but for the labour movement as a whole: ‘The trade unionism we grew up with and have come to know, is under siege and in need of either refurbishment or replacement’ (SEIU Organizing Department collection, 19 November 1992). Additionally, this group played a key role in designing and implementing a system of rewards and sanctions. They set up procedures to monitor local unions, and standards for determining ‘competence’:

The test for deciding whether a local has a good administration system can first be centered on the types of information and interaction a local has with the International Union’s offices. Membership lists, timely and accurate per capita payments, [union political activity] quotas met in full and on time, … can begin to describe an [sic] threshold of competence that would sort out various contenders for more sustainable awards. (SEIU Organizing Department collection, 19 November 1992)

National staff also authored manuals and training kits designed to educate and proselytize members and staff on SMU practices. A 1992 report by the national president delineated the plethora of manuals that came out during this period:

New educational materials produced include a completely revised SEIU Steward Kit as well as a newly updated SEIU Steward Manual in English, Spanish, and Canadian editions. Increased emphasis is being placed on training in administrative skills for chief executive officers, secretary-treasurers, and office managers. Accordingly, SEIU’s administrative and financial management manual, Keeping the Record Straight, has been completely revised. (SEIU International Convention Collection, 1988)

This period also saw national staff physically move to local unions, and many ran for elected positions in local unions, once there. Doing so guaranteed that local unions would remain loyal to the social movement logic.

Some local union staff continued their political resistance, but found their efforts thwarted by candidates backed by the more resourceful national union. In an interview with the author, a former leader of the opposition in a Los Angeles local union explained the difficulty:

They used a strategy whereby they took immediate control and the money counts a lot. We did not have any financing, and they had it all. The International had the money to buy everything. So they intervened and annulled everything, they diverted the attention and displaced all the staff that had supported us, almost 50% were displaced, and they only left those who supported them. (Personal interview, member of Los Angeles local union and former opposition leader, 2006)

Most local staff compromised by adopting SMU practices and complying with new rules. However, in their daily practice local union staff tried to enact the occupational logic as much as possible, for example, by promoting representation to a greater extent than organizational rules stipulated, and narrating a vision for the union rooted in the occupational community.

Outcomes

Inter-group contestations revolved around control over rules during this phase, and were marked by efforts to theorize and legitimize new organizational identities. Growing commitment to the social movement logic was used by top executives and national staff to set in place rules and structures that were essentially bureaucratic in nature. Local staff continued to resist such interventions but were increasingly unsuccessful in retaining powerful positions. Thus this phase saw an overlapping of the social movement and bureaucracy logics, with some decoupling of local practices from both logics.

Phase III (2005–2007): institutionalized state

Critical events

During the 2000s and particularly after 2005, the SEIU emerged as a force to be reckoned with, not just in the labour movement but also in progressive national politics. Already the country’s second-biggest union with a sophisticated political apparatus, the SEIU played a large role, for example, in organizing labour’s support for Barack Obama in 2008. In an interview with the journal Labor, Andy Stern, SEIU’s president during 1995 to 2010, attributed these developments to having figured out ‘how to merge politics and organizing’, a central principle of the social movement logic:

We probably thought that [the 2008] election allowed us to take the work we had done about how to merge politics and organizing – that we had done at least in SEIU so successfully in states – and see if we could apply it in the ultimate moment of opportunity, which was to have Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress …. (Fink & Luff, 2011)

The union now attracted a steady stream of university-educated staff through formal channels, such as the Organizing Institute, a union training centre (Rooks, 2004). Young aspiring activists interviewed as part of this study considered the SEIU to be the ‘shining star’ in using innovative protest methods. Organizing methods became standardized for the consumption of large numbers of staff who took the validity of these methods for granted. Uncertainty over the outcome of organizing campaigns was greatly reduced as employers increasingly cooperated with the union, finding the threat of protest credible. In 2000 taxes were raised significantly on local unions in order to boost funds for strategic organizing, which added incentives for local unions to merge, thereby cutting administrative costs. Mergers reduced representative structures and made it more difficult for members and staff to participate in decision-making.

Political actions

As the market share of unionized employers grew, the union sought to maintain its power over them. Wage gains in one geographic area, for example, were difficult to sustain unless wages increased over all markets that unionized employers operated in (Lerner, 1996). National staff concluded that consolidating local unions to include more unionized workers in the same bargaining unit would increase bargaining power. This belief paralleled an argument that the SEIU was championing in the labour movement – that national unions operating in similar markets should merge. Unlike in the previous phase, when reforms were fiercely contested, developments in Phase III were met with little overt resistance.

Due to generational change, top executives now came from among the ranks of former national staff. The new top executives shared with national staff an ideological commitment to the social movement logic. Top executives drew from SEIU’s experience to theorize applications of the logic in a broadened field of action. They mobilized like-minded unions into an alternative labour federation whose member unions committed to reinvigorate organizing. They masterminded new campaigns, such as a campaign for increasing the accountability of private equity firms, and exported the social movement logic overseas via ‘global union’ alliances (Aguiar & Ryan, 2009; Lerner, 2007, p. 28).

New national staff who joined the union during the institutionalized phase were acutely aware of the union’s status as an innovator. These staff focused on the union’s achievements rather than its shortcomings, expressing awe at its ingenuity. Staff described working for the union as a ‘fascinating’, ‘intense’ and ‘rewarding’ experience that merited lifestyle sacrifices and, ironically, limits on their own discretion. A senior organizer’s comment on the union’s management of its political fund was typical: ‘Just a very, very smart way of doing it. It’s not only smart, but it’s also legal and it’s a way in which you maximize the usage of your hard dollars’ (personal interview, 2006). For many staff, what the SEIU was doing to empower janitorial workers was ‘as good as it gets in America’. National staff worked to create an organizational legacy of activism even as campaigns became routinized. They created a ‘Justice for Janitors Day’, authored union-wide slogans and designated the ‘SEIU color’. Protests were staged even when they were not essential for winning, as explained by a director: ‘You can say that campaigns became faster after 2000, but in some cities we still put on a fight so that people can remember what the fight was about’ (personal interview, 2005).

Union documents shared with the author during this period emphasized ‘strength in unity’. Informants were reluctant to discuss past conflict, and became visibly uncomfortable when asked about specific incidents. Staff engaged in a process of editing organizational history, for example, by justifying past conflict as necessary for advancing the movement. One staff’s justification of the 1995 takeover of a dissenting Los Angeles local by the national union was typical:

Look, our industry is confronted with a vicious predatory industry such as janitorial work. Men and women can be thrown out of their jobs. … It’s like, what’s democracy to someone who’s gone from 10 dollars an hour to 4.75 at that time. And we had the nonsense of that debate [about union democracy]. (Personal interview, 2006)

The disparity between goals espoused by national and local staff became less significant during the institutionalized phase. Due to replacement and turnover, local unions were staffed with people who identified with social movement goals and supported national union initiatives even when their own positions were downgraded due to mergers across locals. One local union president who was thus downgraded expressed a common perspective: ‘If you ask me, this merger is a big hassle. But I don’t mind giving up being president. It’s too bad about [the loss of] the executive board members. But they love the union and they will stay around. We are stronger if we are bigger’ (personal interview, 2006). Ordinary members and most staff were less reflective about new developments, and many believed that larger local unions followed naturally with practising the social movement logic. Enlarged local unions now bore the weight of resourcing most campaigns, unlike in earlier periods when they were heavily subsidized by the national union. Dissent usually came from more recent staff who were recruited into the SEIU from more grassroots activist organizations, and from union members who resented reduced opportunities for voice in the union. However, rather than mobilize politically as before, dissenters I interviewed kept their disagreement within close quarters.

Outcomes

Contrary to earlier phases marked by inter-group contests over practices and rules, the institutionalized state was characterized by tacit agreements that reflected opponents’ perceptions that resistance was futile and generational change among staff. The establishment of ‘mega locals’ and the implementation of standardized practices and protocols were evidence that a bureaucratic logic with no historical precedence in the SEIU had been institutionalized. While the union did not adopt goals of bureaucratic unionism such as job control and a narrow focus on economic issues, it adopted its top-down decision-making and centralized governance structure. At the same time, more than ever before, the SEIU became synonymous with SMU externally. Interviews with staff and members revealed that staff identified solely with the social movement logic and often explicitly rejected the bureaucratic logic. Statements such as ‘I really wanted to work with low wage workers. I wanted to work with immigrant workers’ and ‘I don’t think I’m working for a union. When I go out there and I see the workers, it could be my Aunt or my Mom, their livelihood’ suggested that the social movement logic, and not the bureaucratic logic, defined the organizational identity that had been constructed.

Discussion

This study examined the intra-organizational institutionalization of an organizational template in the face of multiple institutional logics competing for allegiances within the organization. Figure 3 represents a process model in the SEIU in which events, political actions, inter-group contestations and negotiated orders propelled the social movement logic to higher levels of settled states. The findings contribute to two key literatures. The first of these is scholarship on organizational responses to institutional pluralism. The present findings suggest that the politics required of organizational actors in institutionalizing a new organizational template is varied and dynamic, and include processes hitherto conceptualized as cognitive and symbolic, such as legitimizing, constructing organizational identities and editing organizational history. This study also adds to scholarship on organizations as political systems. Specifically, it adds to our understanding of how politics can construct integrative organizational identities. Furthermore, it shows how field-level institutionalization influences the nature of negotiated orders in inter-group contestations for power and status.

Figure 3.

Institutionalization of a new institutional template: a process model

Organizational responses to institutional pluralism

Although there has been considerable theorizing about how organizations adopt new templates under multiple institutional pressures (Greenwood & Hinings, 1996; Marquis & Lounsbury, 2007; Rao et al., 2003), with the exception of a few empirical studies (Battilana & Dorado, 2010; Binder, 2007) the institutionalization of organizational templates in the face of pluralism has been insufficiently theorized (Kraatz & Block, 2008). In particular, although many scholars have stipulated the importance of organizational politics as a means of crafting integrative processes in an organization facing a pluralistic environment (Greenwood et al., 2011; Kraatz & Block, 2008; Pache & Santos, 2010), how politics generates integrative outcomes has been black-boxed. The present findings refute both an overly discursive view of institutionalization as a process of legitimization as well as an overly agentic view of institutionalization as the product of exceptional leadership.

The view of institutionalization as a legitimization process has emphasized rhetorical strategies and the practice of theorizing as mechanisms for institutionalization (Lawrence, Suddaby, & Leca, 2009; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005; Zucker, 1991). The current study suggests that rhetoric is embedded in broader intra-organizational political processes. Politics encompassed a diverse range of activities geared to uphold or thwart, and legitimate or delegitimate, the new institutional logic. These included unequivocally political activities such as lobbying higher authority and mobilizing resources and opinion, but also activities understood hitherto as ‘rhetorical strategies’ (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005) such as theorizing, and constructing and editing organizational identity and history. Theorizing was not only carried out through discursive methods but was firmly embedded in political processes, such as formal petitioning, manipulating attention and visibility, and discrediting and eliminating opponents from political platforms. Likewise, organizational identity was politically constructed, through proponents’ actions that silenced or muffled opponents’ attempts to frame and advance alternative realities, ratification of events, rituals and symbols that upheld a particular organizational legacy, and careful editing of organizational history.

Equally important, the findings challenge an overly agentic view of institutionalization in pluralistic contexts which has maintained that the exercise of exceptional leadership is crucial for organizations to successfully manoeuvre multiple institutional pressures (Kraatz, 2009; Kraatz & Moore, 2002; Ocasio, 1994). Such a view echoes field-level theories that focus on highly politically and socially adept individuals as guiding lights of institutional change (DiMaggio, 1988; Fligstein, 2001). Findings show that top executives acted instrumentally towards the social movement logic, and were influenced at critical points by a group with more intense value commitments to the new institutional logic, the national staff, who lobbied for strategies to implement SMU and designed rules and systems to buttress them. Opponents were also critical influences in the institutionalization process, affecting the timing of key events, the format and nature of structural changes, as well as the institutionalization of a bureaucratic logic alongside the championed social movement logic. While actors’ resistance against dominant institutional logics at the field level has been shown to generate new forms of professional entrepreneurialism (Marquis & Lounsbury, 2007), the role of resistance in intra-organizational institutionalization has been relatively understudied (one recent exception is Courpasson, Dany, & Clegg, 2012). Furthermore, as discussed below, the focus has usually been on the threat of intra-organizational resistance thwarting successful organizational change (Greenwood & Hinings, 1996), while a more transformative and generative role that resistance can play has been largely overlooked.

Organizations as political systems

This study builds on recent literature on institutional and organizational politics that has emphasized their generative capacities (Courpasson et al., 2012; Kraatz & Block, 2008; Stryker, 2000). The findings expand our understanding of politics as an integrative and constructive process by specifying the links between inter-group contestations, intra-organizational negotiated orders and field-level developments. Additionally, the findings suggest that organizational politics may be a mechanism for producing organizational heterogeneity at the field level.

While the negotiated order as a provisional settlement of inter-group conflict have been long available as a concept (Bechky, 2011; Hallett & Ventresca, 2006; Strauss, 1978), the mechanisms that transport the organization from one negotiated order to another has yet to be fully identified. It is evident that actors’ strategies in each phase were reactions to challenges posed by the opposing group in earlier phases. For example, in the early years of reforms, opposition was geared towards repealing new practices, and therefore group contestations revolved around control over practices. Having lost this battle, opponents challenged the authority structures that endorsed new practices, and therefore the nature of contestations shifted from one over control of practices to one over control of rules.

The findings also suggest that the range and nature of political resources available to proponents and opponents changed over time as the social movement logic gained legitimacy within the labour movement, and this affected the settlement that was negotiated in each phase. Although the institutional logics tradition has aimed explicitly for multi-level theorization (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008, pp. 108–9), to date our knowledge of how intra-organizational and field-level processes of institutionalization are mutually co-constructed is limited (Suddaby et al., 2010). While it is known that organizational actors are influenced by occupational and functional backgrounds in enacting institutional logics (Binder, 2007; Kaghan & Lounsbury, 2011), this study suggests that actors are also politically savvy in their enactment of logics. Political opportunities accorded by field-level advancements in the social movement logic were seized by proponents to vanquish internal opposition and advance the institutionalization project. On the other hand, as internal opposition was quelled and stability regained, the SEIU was able to play a more prominent role as an institutional entrepreneur in the labour movement.

Lastly, the present findings suggest that intra-organizational negotiated orders aid our understanding of how organizational forms may diverge from initial templates. Settlements reflect the logics and practices that proponents utilize in order to defeat, circumvent or compromise with opponents, and represent interim representations of the final organizational form that is institutionalized. In the SEIU, elements of a bureaucratic logic were layered onto the SMU template and became part of the final form that was emulated by other unions. Political process, then, could be a mechanism for creating organizational heterogeneity in the field, accounting for divergence from the ideal typical template. Scholars of organizational learning have pointed out that organizations learn differently from past experience because learning incorporates idiosyncratic biases (Haunschild & Sullivan, 2002; Miner, Haunschild, & Schwab, 2003). Similarly, political dynamics may introduce idiosyncratic elements to organizational form. Divergence caused by political process, which involves layering and compromising, should be distinguished from hybridization, which implies purposeful design (Powell, 1987; Thornton et al., 2005, p. 128). It is also distinct from the concept of synthesis in the dialectic tradition, which draws mainly from the arguments provided by the parties themselves. In the current study, actors were creative and resourceful in their institutionalization project, reaching out beyond initially available institutional logics to achieve their aim.

Conclusion

This study has examined intra-organizational politics as a mechanism in which new organizational templates are institutionalized in pluralistic settings. A contribution to the literature on organizational responses to institutional pluralism has been to show that actors engage in a range of political activities that were previously theorized as rhetorical, normative or cognitive processes. This study has contributed to broadening the conceptualization of organizations as political systems by showing how political processes affect the development and institutionalization of an organizational form.

Given the research setting of the labour movement, the results of this study extend particularly well to contexts where value commitments to institutional logics reflect personal identities as well as career interests, such as the field of social movements and the non-profit sector. Further research is needed to specify how political processes interact with normative and cognitive processes in the process of institutionalization. The findings also call for a more systematic examination of whether intra-organizational needs in the process of institutionalization produce organizational heterogeneity at the field level.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank David Courpasson and three anonymous reviewers for valuable and insightful comments that improved the article. Any remaining errors are my own. I am grateful to staff and members of the SEIU who participated in and encouraged this research.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Kyoung-Hee Yu is a lecturer of management in the Australian School of Business, University of New South Wales. Her research focuses on institutional and organizational changes affecting work and employment with particular interest in political process. She received her doctorate from the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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