Walking a Fine Line

Abstract

As they assemble organizations from different economic sectors, intersectoral collaborations are co-constituted by institutional pluralism. However, the intimacy and inequality of these arrangements also constrain an organization’s ability to respond strategically to the concomitant institutional pluralism. Members of the organization experience pluralism as a tension I call moral ambivalence, that is, they simultaneously hold opposing judgments about their actions or the situations in which they find themselves. Moral ambivalence leads actors to engage in institutional work, pragmatic compromises directed toward coping with the competing institutional rules they face. This institutional work produces hybrid actions that, in turn, help the organization maintain internal cohesion and prevent negative outcomes. The article traces the sources of institutional pluralism to organizational imprinting from for-profit partners and institutional pressures from other members of the field. Data come from an ethnography of a single nonprofit organization that collaborates with several large for-profit organizations.