Adaptation: People Processing and the Demise of an Organizational Field

• In Event: 3564 - Measuring and Managing Organizations

Abstract

As public funding for social welfare programs has diminished in recent years, scholars have described the many ways in which institutions are managing the overflow of demand amidst increasingly scarce resources. Often, management techniques manifest in the processing and ranking of populations such that some eligible clients are prioritized for assistance over other eligible clients, resulting in varied and increasingly unequal access to services. Yet, the residual effects of this people processing work remains largely unexplored. Drawing on fifteen months of fieldwork within Boston, Massachusetts’ state subsidized child care system, one of the country’s largest and most generous, I describe the deleterious effects of institutionalized population processing practices on the organizational field of child care providers. As populations are sorted, prioritized, and exchanged, child care providers are finding their ecological surroundings increasingly inhospitable. In response, providers are adapting, but doing so in ways that deepen the temporal divides in access to assistance and expedite the deterioration of the field – a process I refer to as adaptation looping. Caught amidst narrowing access to subsidized child care, beneficiaries too are adapting, but in ways that undermine the institutional motivations underlying the prioritizing of populations – a secondary form of adaptation looping.

Author

• Jennifer Bouek, Brown University