Reconfiguring Organizational Commitments: Boundary Crossing in Civic Groups
- PDF / 309,077 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 43 Downloads / 201 Views
RESEARCH PAPERS
Reconfiguring Organizational Commitments: Boundary Crossing in Civic Groups Sarah Gaby1
Accepted: 28 August 2020 International Society for Third-Sector Research 2020
Abstract Scholarship on boundary crossing in organizations typically focuses on endogenous strategic decisions to broaden audiences and resource pools, rarely capturing exogenous shocks that initiate the process. Yet, rapid social change can also drive organizations to cross boundaries. Boundary crossing or adopting the issues, causes, and claims of other groups can lead organizations to reconfigure, returning to core questions determined during their founding about the problems they seek to address and who belongs in the group. In doing so, organizational trajectories change, producing lasting transformations or leading to disbanding. This study uses multi-sited participant observation and interviewing to examine the influence of Black Lives Matter on two social movement organizations, analyzing the internal organizational processes that determined and defined boundary crossing and the divergent outcomes for the participating organizations. This study is one of the first to depict the internal experience of interacting across movement boundaries. Keywords Civic organizations Social movement organizations Inequality Boundary crossing Organizational reconfiguration
& Sarah Gaby [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, 601 S. College Road, Bear Hall 207, Wilmington, NC 28403-5978, USA
Introduction Organizations are typically tightly wedded to their areas of interest and commitment, rarely crossing boundaries to reconfigure their groups around other goals and issues. For instance, there are few examples of animal rights organizations adopting issues central to the feminist movement. Social movement organizations (SMOs), in particular, are often bounded by the invisible lines and norms of the social movement industry (SMI) to which they belong (e.g., environmental, health, etc.). Organizations that diversify interests typically do so in response to endogenous factors, such as a desire to increase recruitment, acquire greater resources, or enhance goal attainment (Beamish and Luebbers 2009; Heaney and Rojas 2014; Wang et al. 2019). For example, peace movement organizations generated broader morality-based claims to increase recruitment by appealing to women’s movement participants whose sons were drafted into the military (Meyer and Whittier 1994). Boundary crossing or adopting the claims, issues, and causes of another movement often occurs without the formal ties of alliances or coalitions (see Wang et al. 2019), making instances like these difficult to identify and observe. Although limited recent work has sought to understand the ‘‘antecedents and outcomes’’ of boundary crossing in organizations, this work is absent observation of the process of boundary crossing itself (Wang et al. 2018, p. 167). Rather than observing how boundary crossing operates, scholars prima
Data Loading...
