Logical Transformation: The Organizational Development of Institutional Entrepreneurship and Social Skill in Kerala’s Kudumbashree Movement

• In Event: 153 - Regular Session. Organizations: Institutional Change & Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Organizational structures and processes can foster the development of institutional entrepreneurship and social skill. Collective, public action is the consequence of both reflexive, intrapersonal capabilities and social, interpersonal capabilities, each of which reinforces the other. As a result, individual and collective capability development are recursively intertwined and reinforce or deter each other over time. Organizations promoting capabilities through various kinds of individual and collective experiences foster the development of institutional innovation, both endogenous and exogenous transformations of organizations and fields. Integrating theories of institutional logics and strategic action fields, six organizational criteria that foster the development of institutional entrepreneurship and social skill are demonstrated using five months of ethnographic and historical research on the Kudumbashree Mission for Poverty Eradication and Women’s Empowerment in Kerala, India. Founded in 1998 in the wake of Kerala's People’s Planning Campaign for Democratic Decentralization (PPC), Kudumbashree increases grassroots political participation while mitigating increasing poverty due to India’s economic liberalization. A federated network of 245,000 neighborhood groups (NHGs) and 4,200,000 members, Kudumbashree is one of the largest micro-thrift and micro-credit organizations in the world and principally responsible for the survival of the local self-governance institutions empowered through PPC. Ethnographic fieldwork consisted of observations in five NHGs and 54 interviews with NHG members and officials, as well as local and state-level organizers, activists, scholars, and policy-makers during the summers of 2012 and 2013. Special focus is given to an eight-week protest against a government-owned alcohol shop mobilized through Kudumbashree.

Author

• Matthew Block, University of New York