Front-Stage and Backstage Convening: The Transition from Opposition to Mutualistic Coexistence in Organizational Philanthropy

Abstract

Actors who support dissimilar institutional models can overcome conflict and move toward mutually beneficial coexistence. To see how, we studied the emergence of venture philanthropy, a rationalized approach to organizational philanthropy in Europe. Our analysis leverages multiple sources of data and focuses on field-configuring events as settings for interactions. We show how convening—bringing together dissimilar actors—in different types of events creates relational spaces for negotiation over institutional models, their practices, and their underlying assumptions. Front-stage interactions in public spaces are important in making models accessible to a broad audience, whereas backstage interactions in protected spaces allow models to be deconstructed. Our findings show that the interplay between front stage and backstage enables the reframing of institutional models by refining the constituent practices, which neutralizes opposition and facilitates joint courses of action. Our results contrast with popular accounts of competing institutional logics, advance organizational research on the role of events in field trajectories, and expose the collective rationalization of giving.