The Joys of Gardening: Collectivist and Bureaucratic Cultures in Conflict

Collectives and bureaucracies differ not only in structure and values, but interpret the social world and engage in actions based on quite different themes, symbols, and meanings. These diverse patterns of symbolic discourse, or organizational cultures, are assessed in the case of the recent urban gardening movement. Although government agencies assisted the movement by providing resources to movement collectives and by establishing thousands of urban gardening projects, collectives and bureaucracies had different meanings for what appeared to be the same experience. A comparison of how each described the benefits of urban gardening and structured the gardening experience for participants show serious underlying differences between these organizational cultures and a source of potential bureaucratic/collectivist conflict. Implications for understanding apparent official opposition to collectivist movements are also assessed.