The Untapped Potential of Critical Organizational Studies for Understanding Human Service Organizations' (Anti-)Oppressive Practices and Possibilities

Background: Human service organizations (HSOs) translate policies into practice and outcomes via their everyday work. HSOs are thus key sites for maintaining and/or challenging oppressive ideas about and actions upon people, including clients and staff. Organizational and critical theories are natural partners for studying HSOs' (anti-)oppressive stakes, yet are largely separate theoretical domains. While organizational theories are well-positioned to explain how and why HSOs may (de)stabilize ideologies and actions in routine practice, they often lack explicit political aims to dismantle oppression and dominating power structures. Critical theories, meanwhile, name power as a relational process through which people and knowledge recursively naturalize practices and the structures that legitimize them, with a clear aim to disrupt dominating power structures, but often overlook the organization as an analytic object. Integrating organizational and critical theories can deepen our understanding of how organizations -- as contexts in which people work and actors in their own right -- (re)produce (anti-)oppression.

Aims: 1) Provide examples of how critical and organizational theories can speak to, with, and against one another in productive ways to advance scholarship, policy, and practice and 2) Provide a space for potential collaborators to meet, talk, and advance work that theoretically and empirically examines HSOs' (anti-)oppressive practices and possibilities.

Structure: Four presenters will share critical organizational case examples, drawing upon diverse theories and policy/practice contexts. Organizational theories include new institutionalism, racialized organizations, street-level theory, and diffusion of innovations theory. Critical theories include abolition, disability critical race theory, feminist, and critical technology theories. Empirical contexts traverse the criminal-legal system, education, public health, and municipal government administration. Presenter 1 will illustrate how abolitionist theorizing can guide institutional logics and institutional work theories by discussing research on organizational mechanisms influencing anti-carceral change in public safety institutions. Drawing upon the theory of racialized organizations and disability studies, Presenter 2 will use research on alternative high school transfer as a form of pushout to show how intersectional critical theories extend our understanding of street-level bureaucracy and its relevance for system-wide racially conscious policy reforms. Presenter 3 will bring together organizational theories of institutional logics and street-level bureaucracy with a liberatory harm reduction framework to explore how frontline providers in syringe service programs challenge and/or reproduce oppressive structures when negotiating shifting funds and professionalization demands. Finally, Presenter 4 will draw upon a critical data studies framework to analyze artificial intelligence adoption and diffusion in municipal government settings to highlight the ongoing processes of translation, imagination, and datafication fundamental to technological governance. After presentations, the roundtable will open up for discussion. Participants will consider: 1) what alignments and/or tensions exist between critical and organizational theories; 2) how critical theories can support the development, implementation, and analysis of organizational research; 3) strategies for framing the value and practical application of critical theories to organizational stakeholders, including funders, scholars, organizations, policymakers, and clients; and 4) potential opportunities for research and practice collaborations.