Embedded Differentiation

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 26: Collaboration, conflict, cohesion

Abstract

How do collectives sustain commitment from members who persistently disagree with their dominant values? Prevailing theories predict that such tensions should be resolved through exit, assimilation, contestation, or compartmentalization. Yet in many settings, members remain committed to organizations whose core values they openly contest. We propose that some organizations contain subgroups that do not resolve disagreement but actively structure it. Members maintain allegiance to the larger collective while articulating principled difference from within. We call this embedded differentiation: a collective accomplishment through which difference is not resolved but rendered intelligible, sustainable, and valuable.
We develop our argument through a comparative ethnographic study of two affinity groups at elite U.S. universities, drawing on four years of fieldwork and 98 in-depth interviews. Lewis Center, a nonprofit serving working-class, racially underrepresented students at UC Berkeley, and Christian Fellowship, a student organization for evangelical Christians at Stanford, each navigate fundamental misalignment with their campus's dominant culture. Central to this process are relational frames that redefine members' relationship to the broader organization, allowing them to remain in it while refusing to be fully of it. Our fieldwork reveals three interlocking resources that sustain these frames: cognitive authorities, non-student leaders whose long-term presence and independence lend interpretive credibility; ritualized discursive practices through which members collectively reinterpret experiences of friction; and dense subgroup networks that reinforce shared interpretive orientations through repeated interaction. Embedded differentiation shifts attention from individual coping to collective stabilization of disagreement. It reconceptualizes cohesion as an ongoing interpretive accomplishment rather than a background condition of consensus, and demonstrates that pluralism requires sustained cultural labor and relational infrastructure.

Authors

• Krystal Laryea, University of Notre Dame

• Austin van Loon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Nick Sherefkin, Stanford University