Governing Poverty Through Public Institutions: Institutional Logics and the Reorganization of the American Library

• In Event: Everyday Carcerality: How Organizations Police, Punish, and Control

Abstract

Public libraries are increasingly positioned as frontline social infrastructure amid welfare retrenchment, rising urban inequality, and the erosion of accessible public space. While institutional logics scholarship often interprets organizational complexity through hybridization or selective coupling, this paper argues that, in frontline public institutions, logics may instead be reorganized around the practical problem of governing marginal populations. Drawing on ethnographic observations (340 hours) and interviews with staff at a branch of the Los Angeles Public Library system, the study examines how librarians navigate tensions among three salient logics—Educational, Social Welfare, and Public Space. The findings show that these logics are not enacted as stable or competing orientations; rather, their practical ordering is structured by poverty governance operating through frontline discretionary practices. Staff engage in situational judgments, retrospective rule enforcement, conditional benevolence, and differential management of time and space to reconcile competing demands, allowing the library to maintain a universalistic mandate while informally sorting patrons according to perceived disruption, deservingness, and manageability. By foregrounding poverty governance as the organizing axis of everyday decision-making, the paper makes two contributions. Empirically, the paper advances an account of how contemporary libraries absorb and manage social problems that exceed their formal mission through routine interactional work; theoretically, it refines institutional logics scholarship by demonstrating how external governance pressures can reorder the practical hierarchy of logics without formal hybridization, offering a practice-centered framework for understanding how ostensibly inclusive public institutions produce patterned inequalities through discretionary implementation.

Author

• Madison Liao, University of California, Los Angeles