Clients' Negotiated Institutional Identities in Social Enterprises

Background and Purpose: There has been a recent interest in hybrid organizational forms at the intersection of the market and social services sectors.  Work integration social enterprises (WISEs), for example, aim to integrate hard to employ persons into the labor market by providing them employment opportunities within a social service context while also producing and selling products or services on the market.  Consequently, WISEs assume dual organizational identities as human service organization and commercial enterprise.  Correspondingly, clients assume identities as service users and workers, and service providers assume identities as employers, supervisors, and social service workers. Drawing on insights from the institutional logics perspective, this study investigates a WISE that provides social services and transitional work opportunities to homeless men and women.  The study asks:  How does the interaction of multiple identities found in hybrid organizations influence the relationship between service providers and clients?  What are the implications for the provision of human services? 

Methods:  This case study of a WISE draws on ethnographic data from early 2006 through 2008 which includes 1) direct observation of board meetings, staff meetings, teleconferences, and email exchanges, 2) casual discussions with insiders before and after meetings, and 3) loosely structured interviews with current and previous organizational actors at all levels.  The data are coded for themes.

Results:  I find that the interactions among multiple identities lead to role ambiguity, conflict, and political struggle; yet they also provide cultural material and political opportunities for organizational change that aligns with service user preferences.  For example, the service users exploited the ambiguities in their identities and political tensions between organizational units to define themselves as workers rather than clients, and by doing so they altered the organization’s service technology. In particular, they marginalized the social service unit by avoiding it, and in the process reinforced the organization’s identity as a commercial enterprise. This dynamic provided conceptual space for organizational members to critically reflect on the expressed needs of service users and the root causes of their problems; yet created organizational tensions and raised new moral dilemmas for the provision of human services.  In particular, the organization struggled to reconcile its stated mission, which was to provide transitional work experience leading to employment in the labor market, with its transformed practices, which were to provide long term sheltered employment to service users who, given their multiple barriers to employment in the labor market, preferred to remain in sheltered employment at the WISE.  

Conclusions:  I end by theorizing the implications of sector overlap for the implementation of social services. I suggest that sector overlap may generate praxis—political action embedded in multiple contradictory institutional arrangements.  In turn, praxis can provide the scaffolding for a dialectical framework of social work practice that enables service users and providers to challenge the underlying assumptions of practice and dynamically experiment with and modify human service technology accordingly. One challenge of this dialectical model is the ongoing management of political and cultural tensions that arise under conditions of institutional contradiction.