Port of Call: How Ships Shape Foreign-local Interactions

• In Event: 413 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Refereed Roundtable Session. Table 01. Culture and Organizations
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 08. Institutional Encounters

Abstract

In an increasingly interconnected world where interactions between foreigners and locals have important economic and political consequences, how do organizations shape these interactions? A rich body of literature examines the dynamics of organizational fields. Yet most research assumes that organizations are permanent or, in the case of entrepreneurial startups, intend to be permanent. What about transient organizations, those that neither have nor intend to have a permanent presence in their field? How do these types of organizations shape foreign-local interactions? I argue that Goffman’s work on total institutions is useful for understanding this question in cases where transient organizations are self-sustaining by virtue of being continually on-the-move. In this paper, I examine a U.S. military ship and an evangelical missionary ship in port at the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, Philippines as transient total institutions to analyze how they influence the organizational field of the port in which they are docked. I focus on how foreign-local interactions are constructed both “from above,” meaning the organizational form of ships, and “on-the-ground,” meaning from the perspective or institutional logics of the ships’ workers and the locals who visit the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, and the associated unintended consequences. I find that transient total institutions’ particular organizational forms and associated institutional logics shape consumption patterns of members even after they leave the ship, gender the geography of the local community, and structure interactions between ships’ members and locals that are often built on faulty information and stereotypes

Author

• Victoria Reyes, University of Michigan