Suchergebnisse

How can people acquire the capacity and community to potentially move institutions, such that they are change-promoting organisations? La paperson's (2017) scyborg describes how within organisations, members can repurpose colonial practices for decolonised, transformative goals. My research suggests that prefigurative organisations can offer spill-over effects by strengthening the experiential organising repertoire and ties of scyborgs across organisations. Using my own experiences, I examine how my participant observations at a democratic independent school and its growing global network have informed my efforts to infuse conventional organisations, including my public university, with liberatory practices. Conventional organisations blur boundaries and thereby promote overwork, obscure work often performed by minoritised members and encourage networking for transactional purposes. In contrast, scyborgs' transformative practices: (a) make invisible and usually devalued and extracted work visible; (b) encourage and support voice and member-led efforts; and (c) cultivate relations as avenues for mutual growth.

AbstractUsing observations of US governmental, advocacy and human service organizations' (GAHSOs) talks, I show how these intermediary organizations endorsed 'bounded relationality' when teaching conventions about exchanges in the social insurance market. Bounded relationality synthesizes (a) Simon's argument that organizations' goals and practices help people compensate for bounded rationality—their cognitive limitations with decision-making—and (b) Zelizer's relational work, which emphasizes how social relations animate market exchanges. GAHSOs attempted to acculturate older adults and their agents to decision-making routines of information-gathering and processing consumers, savvy information-seekers and watchful monitors. GAHSOs advised routinizing relational work toward making exchanges, including layperson relational work by family members and friends and expert relational work by professionals and advocacy and human service organizations. Bounded relationality supported people's decision-making when initiating, maintaining or ending exchanges that organizations would recognize and process. By studying how intermediary actors facilitate bounded relationality, we understand how organizations encourage consumer exchanges.

Under what conditions do interorganizational efforts shift from sustaining stasis to facilitating change through advocacy in strategic action fields? Using observations of nonprofit umbrella organizations' meetings for organizations that served older adults "aging in place," I identify how organizations collectively reacted to exogenous shocks. I show how members first focused on sensemaking rather than challenging the state about policy changes. However, when a policy change unleashed new organizations into their field, incumbent organizations started exploring defensive tactics against competitors at their umbrella organizations' meetings. At meetings, organizations shifted to meaning-making, developing a frame that advocated people's well-being, cost-savings, and fraud-busting. This frame supported collective action toward creating regulations that protected their clients and organizations' positions. I argue that organizations can recognize horizontal relations with other organizations and react to threats or entertain cooperation. However, they are less likely to mobilize vertically against the state.

Using observations, interviews, and archival research of an organization that coordinates the annual Burning Man event, I argue that storytelling is a mechanism by which stakeholders can demand accountability to their needs for recognition and voice. I identify particular frames, or perspectives and guides to action, articulated in members' stories. Deploying a personalistic frame, storytellers recounted individuals' contributions toward a collective endeavor. Such storytelling commemorated efforts overlooked by official accounts and fostered bonds among members. Other storytellers identified problems and organizing possibilities for consideration under the civic society or anarchist frames. By familiarizing organizations with members' perspectives and interests, stories facilitate organizational learning that can better serve stakeholders' interests. Additional research could explore whether (1) consistent face-to-face relations (2) within a bounded setting, such as an organization, and (3) practices that encourage participation in organizing decisions and activities are necessary conditions under which storytelling can enable accountability to members' interests.

AbstractHow individuals can exercise creativity in collectivities is unclear. We thus need to more thoroughly investigate the 'black box' of organizational creativity. Future research should consider creativity in a variety of organizations, rather than just those that are known for creative outputs or practices. In addition, we need to examine what I call everyday, relational, and proto‐institutional forms of organizational creativity. Intra‐ and inter‐organizational aspects can enhance or depress such organizational creativity: (1) within the organization's boundary: internal interactions among organizational members and (2) outside the organization's boundary: the surrounding organizational environment or field, which include competing or supporting organizations, other organizational actors, and the state. These two aspects pose dilemmas about how to organize that can constrain or enhance organizational creativity. In addressing these dilemmas, organizations must mediate between under‐ and over‐organizing extremes. Organizations can enable creativity by incorporating changing interests and conditions. Organizations can eschew convention, increase rank‐and‐file involvement with corresponding authority, tolerate ambiguity and deviance, encourage improvisation, and support members' diverse experiences and perspectives.