The Institutional Work of Social Service Providers: Mechanisms That Contribute to Institutional Change in Logics of Public Safety

Background/Purpose: Recent institutional change efforts in public safety involve shifting the relationship between policing and social services, and their respective institutional logics of punishment and care. Social service providers are in a key position to advance and negotiate new roles and practices as policy implementers in a shifting institutional landscape. Indeed, organizational research has shown that service providers shape policy on-the-ground in the face of complex organizational, institutional, and resource environments (Brodkin & Marston, 2013; Lipsky, 2010; Maynard‐Moody & Musheno, 2012). Yet, scholars have paid little attention to how the actions of individuals within organizations may contribute to change in field-level institutional logics (Gawer & Phillips, 2013). In this paper, I ask: How does the institutional work of social service providers contribute to change in the institutional logics of public safety?

Institutional work research explores how individuals within organizations make institutional change happen from the bottom-up, focusing on individuals’ motivations, experiences, and actions in pursuing a broad array of institutional goals (Hampel et al., 2017; Lawrence et al., 2011). This research is often siloed from research on institutional logics (Gawer & Phillips, 2013). Through institutional work, service providers may contribute to institutional change that advances a care-based version of public safety, an urgent issue for social work (Jacobs et al., 2021; Murray et al., 2023).

Methods: A comparative case study was conducted of two cities that have taken substantial steps to transform local public safety services, including through defunding the police. Primary methods included a 21-month virtual ethnography of each city’s transformation process and fifty qualitative interviews of relevant organizational actors, including social service administrators, frontline service providers, police, public administrators, activists, and funders. Using pattern coding and thematic analysis (Saldaña, 2016), ethnographic observation and interviews were used to identify and contextually understand the institutional work mechanisms of service providers that contributed to institutional change in public safety logics.

Results: Qualitative analysis uncovered five specific institutional work mechanisms that contributed to institutional change in logics. The first three mechanisms—segmenting, bridging, and demarcating—are about managing boundaries between institutional logics and their associated actors in the organizational field. The other two mechanisms—spreading and shaping—concern the expansion of logics in the organizational field. Across all mechanisms, I found that institutional and organizational contexts—including relevant policies and programs—facilitated service providers’ institutional work. I argue that service providers conduct institutional work by managing their relationships to those associated with a conflicting logic, primarily police, thereby contributing to bottom-up institutional change.

Conclusions/Implications: This paper adds to our understanding of how institutional work supports change in institutional logics. Marrying these perspectives underscores how the institutional work of service providers is based in distinct approaches regarding how and by whom public safety should be achieved (i.e., logics and their professional representatives). Through uncovering these mechanisms, this paper contributes to discussions taking place among social workers regarding their appropriate relationship to police and carceral systems. Findings underscore how restricting inter-professional collaboration can be important to institutional work with anti-oppressive aims.