Jurisdictional Struggles over an Institutional Logic: Organizational Conflict in a Religious College

• In Event: 388 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Paper Session. Organizational Culture and Institutional Logics

Abstract

Religious higher education institutions are located at the interstices of multiple potentially conflicting institutional logics—as such, they provide a unique opportunity for research. In this article, I examine an organizational conflict between faculty, the board, and the administrators at a conservative Protestant college as they crafted an official organizational belief statement. Recent literature has considered how clashes between conflicting occupational or institutional logics impact organizations. Here, I demonstrate how control over a shared logic—rather than conflict between dissonant ones—can shape organizational conflict. I describe attempts by two different sets of organizational actors to claim jurisdiction over a shared logic—that of religiously oriented action—and the ways that the sharing of institutional logics both exacerbates conflict and provides strategies for moving beyond it.

Author

• Sorcha Alexandrina Brophy, Yale University