Managed Autonomy: Youth Participation in Organizations

• In Event: 175 - Regular Session. Control and Agency in Organizations

Abstract

Participatory practices in organizations have become a popular topic for scholars and organizational practitioners as they discuss member and civic engagement. Research on civic life in America in the last decade has focused on a shift away from membership to management, such that paid staff instead of members retain control over the organization (Skocpol 2003). Participatory practices in organizations are consequential for the experiences of constituents and for the ability of organizations to develop activists (Han 2014). To date, theorizing about participatory practices in organizations has primarily resulted from studies of employee participation in workplaces. The expectation for an increasing bureaucratization of organizations dates back to Weber (1947), who argued that a bureaucratic management style would take over every element of daily life, resulting in workers having decreased control over their work. Since this early work, organizational scholars (e.g., Putnam 2000) and movement scholars (e.g., DiMaggio and Powell 1991) argued that a bureaucratic approach leads to disempowerment for participants in these organizations. In this paper, I explore participatory politics in organizations using ethnographic and interview data from five service and social movement organizations. I find that youth organizations are run on a continuum from management to autonomy. Organizations that engage youth more fully in participatory practices and in which the youth report learning greater civic skills use a method of managed autonomy, balancing the two approaches. Organizations that use managed autonomy are better able to counteract disparities in the formal engagement of members.

Author

• Sarah Gaby, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill