Best Friends Forever: Relationship Schemas, Organizational Forms, and Institutional Change

Abstract

Scholars have drawn on cultural concepts to demonstrate the capacity of organizational actors to transform existing institutional scripts and invent new ones. When it comes to accounting for the limits on such change, however, scholars have tended to fall back on structural dynamics. I argue that paying attention to the symbolic analogies and oppositions in terms of which institutional schemas have meaning can shed light on the role of cultural constraints alongside creativity in institutional change. In this article, I investigate schemas of personal relationships. By transposing the obligations and expectations of a familiar relationship from one kind of interaction to another—by treating employees like members of a sports team or a research collaborative, for example—organizational actors can bring about new habits of interaction and create new organizational forms. But people’s emotional investment in the integrity of a relationship script may make them unwilling to modify the script when it proves impractical. Shared relationship schemas are thus a source of creativity and constraint. I show that understanding this dialectic accounts for several puzzling features of the diffusion of participatory democratic organizational forms among progressive movements in the late 1960s: notably, that even in the absence of a legitimated model of participatory democracy, activists adopted a similar form of organization, and that, for all their creativity, activists were unable to modify that form to cope with the inequalities it produced.