Building the Big Tent: Brokering Membership in a Newly-Formed Nonprofit Network

• In Event: 1184 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 08. Management and Performance

Abstract

Organizations often decouple their formal policies from their actual practices, especially when they are under strong external pressures to conform to social norms of legitimacy. However, the process by which organizations become decoupled has been under-theorized. It is often assumed that lower-level employees exert agency by breaking organizational rules. In contrast, I argue that in some cases, the extent and nature of decoupling is actively managed by organizational executives, with the goal of achieving organizational goals. This process is justified by a “rhetoric of newness” that frames decoupling as a natural result of creating a new organization. In this paper, the process of decoupling is examined using an ethnographic case study of a newly formed membership association of 28 sports-based youth development nonprofits. This study suggests that executives’ evaluations of legitimacy and social capital within a newly formed enterprise influence their decisions to decouple policies differently for different actors. The findings have implications for broader debates about how cultural norms penetrate organizational decision making, and how formal interorganizational collaborations take their shape.

Author

• Tessa Dorothy Huttenlocher, University of Pennsylvania