Old Structures, New Relations: How Community Development Credit Unions Define Organizational Boundaries (original) (raw)
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In the late 1970s, neoinstitutional and organizational culture theorists challenged prevailing rationalist organizational paradigms by introducing social constructionism to the field of organizations. Despite their common foundation, these approaches built on seemingly contradictory empirical observations. Institutionalists observed that organizations actively copy one another's practices, resulting in substantial isomorphism, whereas culture theorists observed that organizations institutionalize distinctive cultures comprising practices that set them apart from others. These seemingly contradictory findings reflect processes of organizational identity formation and interorganizational construction of legitimacy as they have evolved since the rise of the corporate form in the 19th century. Formation of identity through uniqueness and construction of legitimacy through uniformity are two sides of the same coin. Research on management schools suggests organizations pursue individuation through uniqueness and legitimacy through commonality simultaneously and that organizations bridge the two processes in four ways, which the authors dub imitation, hybridization, transmutation, and immunization.
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The recent “inhabited institutions” research stream in organizational theory reinvigorates new institutionalism by arguing that organizations are not merely the instantiation of environmental, institutional logics “out there,” where organizational actors seamlessly enact preconscious scripts, but are places where people and groups make sense of, and interpret, institutional vocabularies of motive. This article advances the inhabited institutions approach through an inductive case study of a transitional housing organization called Parents Community. This organization, like other supportive direct service organizations, exists in an external environment relying increasingly on federal funding. Most scholars studying this sector argue that as federal monies expand to pay for these organizations’ services, non-profit organizations will be forced to become ever more bureaucratic and rationalized. However, I find that three key service departments at Parents Community respond in multiple ways to this external environment, depending on each department members’ creative uses of institutional logics and local meanings, which emerge from their professional commitments, personal interests, and interactional, on-the-ground decision making. By looking carefully at these three departments’ variable responses to the external environment, we have a better map for seeing how human agency is integrated into organizational dynamics for this and other organizations.
Legitimacy, Strategy, and Resources in the Survival of Community-Based Organizations
Organizations active in mobilizing low-and moderate-income communities make considerable efforts to combat inequalities and build voice for citizens, despite inherent challenges of obtaining resources, maintaining member interest, and retaining staff. How, then, do such groups remain viable—even thriving—organizations? Building upon research on organizational theory and social movements, we examine patterns of survival among a sample of community-based organizations (CBOs) between 1990 and 2004, thus providing the first systematic study of their long-term mortality processes. More specifically, we test how organizations' sociopolitical legitimacy and resources (and strategies for cultivating both) influence survival, finding that the legitimacy of organizations in low-income areas is a double-edged sword, as embeddedness in resource-deprived local environments confers both benefits and disadvantages. In particular, we find the strongest support for the notion that, beyond the considerable effects of externally obtained resources, CBOs also benefit considerably by engaging in even a small amount of grassroots fundraising. Further, although we find significant effects of extra-local legitimacy in the baseline models—through organizations' affiliation with national or regional organizing networks—we find evidence in additional analyses that the survival benefits of network affiliation are largely mediated by resources. We also find sizable but marginally significant effects of local legitimacy, and significant positive effects of organizational age and urban location. Overall, our findings suggest that although cultivating resources is the surest path to survival, organizations that build their legitimacy will be in a better position to compensate for structural resource deficits.
American Behavioral Scientist, 2006
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The nonprofit sector: A research handbook, 1987
Our understanding of nonprofit organizations tends to depend on the notion that they are incorporated, that they have significant budgets, that they are directed by a clear leadership group, and that they are sharply bounded. Those characteristics often do not apply to community-based organizations so this paper is a first effort to state an alternative way of understanding what organizations are, where they come from, and how we ought to think of them in terms that focus on community systems rather than on single organizations. Ideas in this chapter were more fully developed in the book SMALLVILLE. INSTITUTIONALIZING COMMUNITY IN 21st CENTURY AMERICA. This paper also started a dialog with Peter Dobkin Hall whose chapter "Cultures of Trusteeship" was both linked to this chapter and, in turn, led to the research in SMALLVILLE.
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SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
The concept of a community form is drawn upon in many subfields of organizational theory. Although there is not much convergence on a level of analysis, there is convergence on a mode of action that is increasingly relevant to a knowledgebased economy marked by porous and shifting organizational boundaries. We argue that communities play an underappreciated role in organizational theory -critical not only to occupational identity, knowledge transfer, sense-making, social support, innovation, problem-solving and collective action but, enabled by information technology, increasingly providing socio-economic value -in areas once inhabited by organizations alone. Hence we posit that organizations may be in the shadow of communities. Rather than push for a common definition, we link communities to an organization's evolution: its birth, growth and death. We show that communities represent both opportunities and threats to organizations and conclude with a research agenda that more fully accounts for the potential of community forms to be a creator (and a possible destroyer) of value for organizations.
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