Plurality Of Organizations Research Articles

Partnering in construction re-visited: gauging progress in industry practice and prospects for advances in academic research

Despite the ubiquity of partnering and alliancing in industry discourse and academic research, questions remain about the extent of transformational change within the sector towards more collaborative working. Revisiting earlier work that highlighted issues, problems and dilemmas of partnering related to definitional ambiguities, conflicting (commercial) orientations and cultural reach and readiness, this paper highlights continuing problems of definition, formalization, translation and performance. Attention is directed towards the lack of external validation and institutionalization, as well as the need for more comparative analysis, situated understanding, awareness of organizational pluralism and recognition of relational dynamics. From this critical review, a framework is presented that embraces the variety and indeterminacy in the many definitions, pathways to collaboration, realizations in practice and evaluative recipes used. Partnering is presented instead as being constituted through complex and interacting bundles of practices that cut across levels of interaction, and which reflect competing (and contested) institutional influences, situated practices, outcomes/effects and performance evaluations. This practice-based approach is more attuned to the diversity and fluidity of the institutional contexts, organizational processes, and project/programme settings wherein partnering is situated and through which it is instantiated, and thus affords new avenues of research into its nature and effects.

Organizations as Innovations: Examining Changes in Journalism Through the Lens of Newly-Emerging Organizations

This article argues that the growing variety of new journalistic organizations and their diversification beyond the traditional newsroom may offer a deeper and broader understanding of change and innovation within journalism. Newly emerging organizations play a multifaceted role in journalism: They are both drivers and results of change; they serve as indicators of the ways in which the structures of journalism and its production processes are evolving; they reveal industry trends early on and enable longitudinal research. Despite the emergence of non-traditional organizations in journalism, existing studies on these new entities remain fragmented and have yet to coalesce into a sustained research program. Against this background, this conceptual article aims to contribute to the ongoing theoretical progress in journalism studies in three ways. First, it identifies key factors of why organizational innovations happen. Second, it systemizes recent studies exemplifying the plurality of new organizations in journalism according to different levels from organization studies, including the field level, the level of organizational populations, and the level of the single organization. Finally, the article proposes a research agenda for establishing “organizations as innovations” as a novel conceptual lens for understanding change and innovation in journalism studies.

Social Enterprises Within the Public Sector’s Purview: A Taxonomy-Based Study on South Korea

This study applies a hierarchical clustering approach to identify social enterprise models that have appeared in a setting of public sector-led incubation. Within such a context, a high degree of conformity ought to be apparent due to the coercive isomorphic pressures associated with public sector patronage. We nominate South Korea for our analysis, given that the rising number of social enterprises in the country is closely related to a regulatory intervention. Based on an analysis of 468 social enterprises, we find, contrary to expectations, that distinct clusters of government-certified social enterprises have emerged, namely social utility niche, job outsourcing, market opportunity, and integrated balanced models. We typologize these models according to their strategic orientation, mission focus, and institutional alignment. In doing so, we contribute to social enterprise research by illustrating how organizational pluralism may manifest when the growth of a population of social enterprises is directly linked to public sector intervention and regulation.

Integrating Traditional and State Institutions for Conflict Prevention: Institutional, Legal and Policy Frameworks in Ethiopia

Despite the prevalence of traditional institutions and the growing official and academic need to ‘recognize,’ ‘empower’ and incorporate them in the state system, competition and harmony between the two persists. There are seventy-six officially listed ethnic groups in Ethiopia, and there exists a great plurality of livelihoods, social organizations, belief systems, and political and legal systems in the country. Notwithstanding the human right issues, traditional institutions operating outside the state are the dominant form of conflict prevention and resolution in Ethiopia. However, the relationship between traditional institutions and state institutions remains unclear. Previous researches either focus on the constitutional set-up and legal framework of states, or their scope is too specific relating to local case studies and their relationship with the state local institutions. This relationship does not, however, only involve legal issues or concerns at the bottom, but it is also an issue of governance and political structure. This article is based on content and document analysis and examines the harmony and competition between the state and traditional institutions in Ethiopia. I argue that despite their practical prevalence, the policy, legal and institutional frameworks in Ethiopia do not plainly address the relationship between the state and traditional institutions. Although de facto recognition seems to exist, the practice shows that the state that envisages the importance of traditional institutions undermines their role in case of conflict with state institutions.

Precarity and counter-hegemonic articulation: from the massification of feminisms toward a radical and plural feminism

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine the phenomenon of the massification of feminisms that has taken place in Argentina since 2015 under the slogan “Ni Una Menos.” I propose the concept of a radical and plural feminism as one that is not only centered on the identity “women” but on precarity as the site of alliances for thinking of the possibilities for an anti-neoliberal feminism. To do this, I focus particularly on the massive demonstrations in the public space, understood as plural performativity, and on the documents agreed by the plurality of movements and organizations that participate in the assemblies, understood as a process of articulation.

Managing Ethnic Minorities with State Non-Repression in Interwar Poland

Why were most ethnic minority organizations in interwar Poland permitted and sometimes encouraged by the state, when the ruling titular ethnic group pursued discriminatory policies against the same minority groups, faced hostility from these groups, and had the capacity to repress their organizations? Current literature focuses on repression as the main strategy deployed by states to manage these relationships. This article, on the other hand, asks why states allow minority organizations to operate. Using the logic of divide and rule, this article demonstrates that, in the case of multi-ethnic states, a state may prefer a plurality of organizations representing a certain minority ethnic group, particularly if the group is restive, in order to ensure that a united opposition cannot legitimately threaten the state's political survival.

Beyond Ideology: Reassessing the Threat of Belarusian Opposition in Interwar Poland

AbstractThe historical literature on interwar Polish policy on Belarusians and other minorities focuses primarily on the relationship between the regime in power and minority groups as a single block, failing to note instances in which regime policies toward specific organizations have not been uniform. Despite the fact that Belarusian ethnic identity was ambiguous and national consciousness low, no fewer than 13 political organizations in interwar Poland claimed to represent the minority. The most influential organization was the Belarusian Peasants’ and Workers’ Union Hromada. Less than two years after the organization’s inception, it was banned in 1927. This article examines why an organization like Hromada, which did not resort to violence and in fact took pains to operate within the legal framework of the Polish constitution, was shuttered by the state, while other organizations with similar profiles were allowed to operate. The article reveals that Hromada was not banned strictly due to what the government considered its radical ideology or because it was an antisystem party, but rather it was banned for its ability to suppress organizational pluralism among Belarusian organizations. The article advances the existing literature by (a) shifting away from analyzing the dynamics between a state and an ethnic group as a whole, by disaggregating the level of analysis to focus on minority political organizations, and by (b) going beyond ideology as the main explanatory variable dictating state policies toward minorities.

Towards a ‘pluralist’ world order: creative agency and legitimacy in global institutions

This article addresses the question of how we should understand the normative grounds of legitimacy in global governance institutions, given the social and organizational pluralism of the contemporary global political order. We argue that established normative accounts of legitimacy, underpinning both internationalist and cosmopolitan institutional models, are incompatible with real-world global social and organizational pluralism, insofar as they are articulated within the parameters of a ‘statist’ world order imaginary: this sees legitimacy as grounded in rational forms of political agency, exercised within ‘closed’ communities constituted by settled common interests and identities. To advance beyond these statist ideational constraints, we elaborate an alternative ‘pluralist’ world order imaginary: this sees legitimacy as partially grounded in creative forms of political agency, exercised in the constitution and ongoing transformation of a plurality of ‘open’ communities, with diverse and fluid interests and identities. Drawing on a case study analysis of political controversies surrounding the global governance of business and human rights, we argue that the pluralist imaginary illuminates how normative legitimacy in world politics can be strengthened by opening institutional mandates to contestation by multiple distinct collectives, even though doing so is incompatible with achieving a fully rationalized global institutional scheme.

The Deutscher Bauernverband from 1945 to 1990: From Uncompromising Stance to Rescue through Europe

Kiran Klaus Patel The Deutscher Bauernverband from 1945 to 1990 From Uncompromising Stance to Rescue through Europe Introduction The Deutscher Bauernverband (the German Farmers’ Association, DBV) was one of the most important pressure groups in the “old” Federal Republic. In recent years too, rivalry with the Bundesverband Deutscher Milchviehhalter (Federal Dairy Farmers’ Association) and fluctuations in agricultural prices resulting from globalization have kept the DBV in the news. Yet historians have yet to reach a consensus about its role. Many general surveys of West German history since 1945 have simply ignored it or touched on it only briefly in a sweeping requiem for the rural world.1 Other studies, in contrast, have argued that even though the DBV certainly helped stabilize democracy, it was not able to assert its agrarian policy interests with much force. Christoph Kleßmann, for instance, warns against overestimating the “actual and enduring successes of the agrarian lobby.”2 According to Gesine Gerhard, on the other hand, the DBV proved capable of exerting enormous influence on agricultural policy, but it did little or nothing to affirm democracy. At least in the 1950s, Gerhard also claims, it resorted to “traditional and radical right-wing ideologies of rural life” to “support its goals.”3 Drawing on hitherto unused archival sources, this article reassesses the history of the DBV, situating it within a longer-term perspective on agrarian pressure groups as well as a broader European context. It argues that the DBV played Translation by Paul Bowman. 1 See for example Eckart Conze, Die Suche nach Sicherheit. Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von 1949 bis in die Gegenwart, Munich 2009; Edgar Wolfrum, Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Gebhardt Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, vol. 23, 10th ed.), Stuttgart 2005, and Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Nach der Katastrophe. Eine Geschichte des geteilten Deutschland, Berlin 2000. 2 Christoph Kleßmann, Zwei Staaten, eine Nation. Deutsche Geschichte 1955–1970, 2nd ed., Bonn 1997, p. 134. 3 Gesine Gerhard, Zwischen Systemkonformität und -opposition. Der Deutsche Bauernverband und die politische Eingliederung der Bauernschaft in die Bundesrepublik in den fünfziger Jahren, in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 13 (2002), pp. 129–38, here p. 130. 84 Kiran Klaus Patel a paradoxical role in three respects. First, it was astonishingly successful in asserting its policy interests into the early 1950s, and it was able to push through vital interests in many fields even later. This success, however, often proved to be more detrimental than beneficial to the majority of its clientele. Second, despite flirting with right-wing ideas, particularly in the early days of West Germany, the DBV actually contributed significantly to stabilizing the political order. Third, although the DBV initially eyed European integration with obstinate skepticism, it was precisely the European Economic Community (EEC) that helped to secure the association’s influence. Adopting an Uncompromising Attitude and Affirming Democracy from 1945 to 1964 The DBV’s later successes were by no means a foregone conclusion. Founded in September 1945, the first pressure group to represent agrarian interests on a supra-regional level was immediately abolished by the Allied Control Council. Over the next few years, agrarian associations were organized at the regional level, but things were sometimes makeshift and improvised. In Lower Saxony, for example, a regional branch had to make do with a “single borrowed room” and a “bench under a copper beech” served as the “meeting hall.” The Deutscher Bauernverband did not emerge from these difficult beginnings until 1948 – the first unified, voluntary organization in the history of agricultural interest groups in Germany. In contrast to the pre-1933 situation, there was no longer an array of coexisting associations representing divergent political, denominational, regional, and socio-economic positions. The situation in Germany also differed from that of other European countries, such as Italy, Belgium and France, where a plurality of organizations continued to exist after 1945.4 4 Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Hannover (henceforth: NLA), VVP 38/323, Sonnemann to Rehwinkel, September 5, 1960; see also Deutscher Bauernverband (ed.; henceforth: DBV), Der Deutsche Bauernverband. Seine Mitglieder und andere landwirtschaftliche Organisationen, Bonn 1987; Edmund Rehwinkel, Gegen den Strom. Erinnerungen eines niedersächsischen, deutschen und europäischen Bauernführers, Dorheim, no year given (ca. 1973), pp. 34–38...

Pluralism of agricultural advisory service providers – Facts and insights from Europe

Agricultural advisory services (AAS) have regained importance for policy makers worldwide and especially in the European Union (EU), because of increased attention to food production and related innovation processes in rural areas. However, a systematic overview of AAS in the EU is missing, and there is a lack of evidence about their diversity and organisational pluralism. With this paper, we systematically explore the variety of advice providing bodies in Europe regarding organisational features, characteristics of service provision and the targeted client groups. The results show a pluralism of organisations that is a widely represented phenomenon across the EU. It implies a variation of service provision quality and targeted clients within and among countries. Moreover, we identify groups among the farming population that apparently are not served by any type of provider. We conclude on impacts of organisational pluralism and especially privatisation of AAS for various client groups, and point out further research needs with the evaluation of AAS performance in general and the potential of farmer-based organisations in particular.

A Case Study of Crime Organization Structure Based on Social Network Method

In this paper, we apply social network approach and analyze the structure of the plurality of criminal organizations, including Pyramid Selling, 911 hijacking organizations, transnational drug trafficking organizations. In the hierarchical organization of MLM, we found that two parameters of network Out2Local, in-Harmonic Closeness difference have huge difference between the different levels of nodes. For relational data of 911 hijacking organization, we use Girvan-Newman algorithm to calculate the number of modules of different societies. When the highest number of associations appears to be four, hijacked planes also happens to be four and we conducted a comparative study based on the result. For structure of cross-border drug crime organization, we summarize Huanghui Xia’s studies. Finally, from the perspective of social network approach, we investigate the efficiency and safety of different types of criminal organizations structure.

Accumulating through food crisis? Farmers, commodity traders and the distributional politics of financialization

ABSTRACTThis paper considers the domestic and international ramifications of financialization and grain price instability in the US agri-food sector. It finds that during the recent period of high and volatile prices, the average income of large-scale farms reached the earnings threshold of the top percentile of US households, and agricultural commodity traders markedly outperformed other corporate groups. In contrast, small-scale farms, particularly those involved in cattle and wheat production, have struggled to manage the uncertainty brought by price tumult. The paper goes on to examine the role that these uneven distributional dynamics play in debates around how hedging and speculation should be defined and regulated in the wake of the food crisis of 2007–08. It shows that a coalition of small-scale farmers has actively pushed for a far-reaching definition of speculation and concomitantly wide-ranging curbs on what they deem to be speculative activity. Conversely, the major commodity traders and a plurality of organizations representing large-scale grain producers have called for a narrower interpretation of speculation which leaves the extant regulatory regime largely in place. With these insights, I suggest that financialization and associated price volatility tend to reinforce inequality in rural America while possibly exacerbating social instability and hardship abroad.

Pluralism in Organizations: Learning from Unconventional Forms of Organizations

AbstractThe bureaucratic organization is still regarded as the conventional organizational form, but is ill‐suited to an increasingly pluralistic world. Research on the variety of organizational forms has increased dramatically over the past three decades and offers the potential to understand better how pluralism is manifested and managed within organizations. However, this research remains fragmented. The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesize research on unconventional organizations to explore how organizations resolve or attenuate the tensions related to pluralism. Drawing from research in leading management journals, it covers seven distinct literatures: ‘referent organization’, ‘temporary organization’, ‘pluralistic organization’, ‘meta‐organization’, ‘bridging organization’, ‘hybrid organization’ and ‘field‐configuring event’. For each literature, the authors trace the genealogy of the key concepts and review their distinct insights regarding organizational pluralism. They then synthesize and discuss their collective contributions and conclude with avenues of research for pluralism in organizations.

Toward Organizational Pluralism: Institutional Intrapreneurship in Integrative Medicine

A critical stage in change toward institutional pluralism occurs when incumbent organizations must begin to integrate diverse logics in their operations. The required institutional work inside organizations at that stage—institutional intrapreneurship—involves distinctive challenges. Incumbent logics are entrenched in organizational routines, status orders, policies, and structures that hamper change and trigger resistance. We used qualitative data from two integrative medicine (IM) programs inside large healthcare organizations to understand how institutional intrapreneurs work to integrate the IM logic in these highly institutionalized organizations. We found that intrapreneurs use opportunistic tactics to create and strengthen organizational free spaces aligned with the new logic, and then leverage the capacity that is developed to extend elements of the new logic into the broader organization. This study suggests that a better understanding of the organizational context helps explain the fate of early-stage efforts toward institutional change.

Basque Patriotic Left: 50 Years of Political and Terrorist Acronyms

In the last two decades, the Basque Patriotic Left has been a monolithic movement with relatively few fissures that has followed the line marked by ETA in an orthodox way. But it has not always been that way. During Franco's regime and in the first years of democracy, the Basque Patriotic Left was formed by a plurality of organizations that had a common project but differed in strategies, terms and nuances, and in the importance given to the contents of the common project. In this work, we will examine the various political and armed organizations that have formed the Basque Patriotic Left from its foundation to the present day.

In this Issue

In this Issue

A pluralistic perspective on the intractability of the International Joint Commission's Lake Ontario-St. Lawrence River study

As environmental public participation has become increasingly mandated worldwide, its advantages and disadvantages have been widely documented. This article uses qualitative analysis of documentation and interviews with 40 participants in a US–Canadian International Joint Commission water management controversy. It demonstrates how ambiguity and diffuse power—that is, two characteristics of organizational pluralism—revealed in communication and governance contribute to the challenges of resolving the 13-year controversy. The article adds to the literature that has largely focused on power disparities between governing or managing organizations and stakeholders and makes recommendations for addressing situations involving organizational and scientific ambiguity as well as relatively equal distribution of power. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Global Bricolage: emerging market powers and polycentric governance

Contemporary globalisation is characterised by an explosion of organisational pluralism. Acronyms such as brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), ibsa (India, Brazil and South Africa), and basic (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) abound. This proliferation of groupings signals a repositioning within global governance and their names serve as metaphors for adjustments among formal and informal modes of global governance. They may be understood in terms of global bricolage: a framework for analysing incipient assemblages in global governance. Rooted in cultural political economy, this notion offers a language for grasping a loose meshwork of groupings based on certain large countries in the global South. The concept of global bricolage deepens analysis of polycentric governance and enables observers to identify three major tensions that mark contemporary global order. The antinomies are between old and new narratives that represent actual or potential shifts in prevailing forms of global governance, between an emancipatory spirit and contested neoliberal norms, and between interregional coalitions and intraregional differences. Quite clearly, the manner of addressing them will bear greatly on the shape of future world order.

Institutional Pluralism and Organizational Evolution: Case studies of military conversion in China

This study examines the internal dynamics of organizational evolution in a pluralistic institutional environment. It employs an embedded multiple-case study method based on process research design. The research setting is the conversion of military organizations in China since its economic reform in 1978. Through an examination of the punctuated equilibrium processes of five case organizations, the study shows that strategic reorientation can help organizations shift their identity to adapt to institutional pluralism. Within locally-based institutional regimes, organizations in different regions may encounter different resources and opportunities from the external environment, resulting in different adaptation strategies and evolutionary processes. These findings have good implications for organizational identity and institutional pluralism literature.

Ola Segnestam Larsson: Standardizing Civil Society: Interpreting Organizational Development in the Tension Between Instrumentalism and Expressivism

The book is the publication of the doctoral thesis of the author, who works as a researcher at the Institute for Civil Society Studies, Ersta Skondal University College, and aims at answering the research question: does the organizational development policy increases the tendency to homogenization, formalization and standardization among civil society organizations? Ola Segnestam Larsson analyzes a particular policy (line of program) of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) aimed at strengthening civil society and its organizations across the world, labelled as organizational development (OD). The author argues that while. on the one hand, the rational and technical instrument of OD improves the organizational performance and capacity building of civil society organizations (CSO), on the other hand, it could endanger the primary function of civil society as a public space, namely to guarantee the plurality of institutions, organizations and expressions (discourses) in society (p. 16). A large amount of research highlights a trend by which CSO moves from an ‘‘expressive’’ to an ‘‘instrumental’’ orientation, where instrumental is understood as the service delivery role of CSO. More recently, CSO has evolved from informal activities of volunteers to formalized organizations of professionals. This convergence of organizational forms and goals has been promoted by importing business models and practices into the civil society sphere (p. 31). The author checks his hypothesis against three case studies of international cooperation in Nicaragua selected from the Sida database, which, in the period 2004–2010, had 500 worldwide projects focused on ‘‘organizational development’’. The first project—‘‘Strengthening an organization of people with disabilities’’—