Tales of nonprofit change and disruption: Institutonal work in voluntary associations

Institutional work has been increasingly applied to analyze organizational change from a micro-perspective. However, it still struggles to explain how individual agency is activated and how change aggregates. This dissertation proposes that emotion initiates institutional work and spreads by the formation of Voluntary Associations (VAs). Emotions, through the formation of common sentiment and emotional entrainment present an understanding of agency counter to a rationalist Webernerian perspective. VAs, illustrate the consequences of this agency, as they have historically been at the vanguard of social need and arise in response to larger institutions failing to address community need. Decreased faith in public institutions has left a vacuum for VAs to fill. The work of VAs is the direct result of a constellation of local actors making sense of social issues shaped by deeply held underlying assumptions. Thus, a relational change perspective is proposed, through which emotions allow for institutional work and resulting changes to institutional logic. The question is asked: how do individuals through VAs apply institutional work to create and scale change? Using linguistic methods, this dissertation analyzes rhetoric, narratives, and discourse present in interviews, news articles, archival documents, and social media to understand organizational change. The first essay explores contradictions in institutional logic resulting from the reinterpretation of a rule pertaining to state agriculture. The second essay analyzes how novel roles and strategies are used to mitigate administrative burden. The final essay assesses how technology is used to manage identity and reconstruct addicts as worthy of love. Ultimately it is shown that non-rational change fueled by emotion allows for individual agency and meaningful changes to institutional logic through the use of relational tools. This dissertation makes several contributions. First, management theories of change are not often used in the nonprofit literature. Next, it expands the institutional work and institutional logic literature by accounting for a micro-perspective and individual agency. Third, it demonstrates that VAs are consequential organizations, and the power of emotion as a uniting force which can initiate change.