Building Bridges: Partner Violence, Substance Use, and Organizational Strategies for Navigating Competing Institutional Logics

Background and Purpose: The notion of institutional logics (Thorton, Ocaisio & Lounsbury, 2012) has entered the social work literature as a way of understanding organizational complexity and change. In this framework, hybrids are organizations drawing on logics associated with separate fields (Skelcher & Smith, 2014). Existing research on institutional logics has used ethnographic methods to provide insight into how actors navigate multiple and conflicting logics (Binder, 2007; Spitzmueller, 2016; Zilber, 2002). Thus we know a great deal about strategic responses within individual organizations and considerably less about variations across organizations engaged in otherwise similar work. Using a mixed methods dataset on the activities of organizations focused on partner violence and substance use, this paper identifies four strategies hybrid organizations use to navigate competing logics associated with the partner violence and substance use fields and the contextual and organizational factors associated with them.

Methods: Data include semi-structured interviews with policymakers, funders, practitioners involved in work on partner violence, substance use, or both (n=49) and a dataset on the characteristics and practices of organizations involved in either type of work in a single region. To develop the dataset, information on organizational size, founding date, mission and services were coded from several existing directories and organizational websites. The dataset includes 379 organizations: 65 focused on partner violence and 314 focused on substance use. Of these, 55 (14.5%) provide services for both partner violence and substance use. Univariate and bivariate statistics were used to identify differences between hybrid organizations; interview data, transcribed verbatim and coded thematically in Atlas.ti, was analyzed using grounded theory methods.

Results: Organizational efforts to address partner violence and substance use fall into four strategies, each associated with different organizational characteristics and external conditions. These strategies, adapted from Skelcher and Smith (2014), index the degree of separation organizations maintain between activities associated with the two areas. Segmented organizations (n=7) address the other issue through an external partnership. Both partners tend to be large and well-resourced nonprofits and, over time, to have adopted a service model prioritizing responsiveness to participant needs over internal regulations. Assimilation (n=9), describes organizations focused on either issue with internal programming to address the other. These organizations are smaller, nonprofit, and are more likely to work with partner violence victims than perpetrators. The third strategy, segregation (n=38), describes organizations with separate, internal programs for partner violence and substance use. This strategy is most often employed by small, for-profit organizations. The fourth strategy, blending, describes organizations with systematically linked, internal programs for both partner violence and substance use (n=1).

Conclusions and Implications: Findings underscore challenges organizations face addressing partner violence and substance use. Funding and regulatory systems in both fields have encouraged development of multiple strategies for work with partner violence victims with substance use needs but constrained parallel work with perpetrators. This analysis suggests the need to revisit state standards for regulating and funding partner violence perpetrator programs to effectively respond to the complex needs of their participants.