Who’s Driving the Bus? Autonomy and Authority in Federally Funded Childcare Programs

• In Event: 30255 - Social Networks and Interorganizational Relations

Abstract

In the decentralized American welfare state, organizations occupy a critical position in delivering services to vulnerable populations. How do actors in these organizations negotiate control over service delivery? While organizational scholars and sociologists have effectively studied the construction of authority for managers and the construction of employee voice and autonomy, only recently have we begun to consider their relationship to each other. Leveraging ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with managers and staff across seven federally funded childcare programs, I offer a qualitative study of the relationship between administrative authority and local autonomy which considers the strong institutional boundaries of federal funding. I find that in this case, local program staff are encouraged by managers to take control of their programs’ implementation and goal setting. However, the amount of information required for these tasks, combined with managers’ selective sharing of information relevant to program execution, often leads local staff to rely heavily on support from their administrative counterparts, re-affirming specialists’ authority and position as experts within the space. Each of these countervailing processes was informed and mediated by the institutional context of federal service work, which manifested on the ground in careful boundary-setting by managers. By introducing a framework of authority and autonomy as mutually constitutive and by documenting the interactional mechanisms behind this relationship, I make new contributions to theories of control and inhabited institutionalism. I conclude with a discussion of the practical implications of uncertainty and shock for work and service delivery in federally funded organizations.

Author

• Mia Grace Boyer-Edwards, Northwestern University