University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Barriers to effective social service provision in the hybrid welfare state: street-level evidence from an anti-gender-based violence organization

(USC Thesis Other)

Barriers to effective social service provision in the hybrid welfare state: street-level evidence from an anti-gender-based violence organization

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

Barriers to Effective Social Service Provision in the Hybrid Welfare State:
Street-Level Evidence from an Anti-Gender-Based Violence Organization

by

Benjamin R. Weiss

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
SOCIOLOGY

August 2020

Copyright 2020 Benjamin R. Weiss
ii

For Bernie, my grandfather.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to the women at the Center for Healthy Futures who so warmly invited me
into their work. Elisa, Marta, Violet, Grace, Adriana, Jovi, Faith, Monica, Sophie, and so many
others – thank you for the laughter and hugs; for teasing me and teaching me; for the moments of
levity amid such heavy work. You all have become family to me over these past three years. The
world is a brighter and more loving place because of you. I hope that what follows accurately
represents your daily triumphs and struggles and that some part of this research proves useful to
you in the work you all will continue to do moving forward.
I enjoyed graduate school largely because I had a phenomenally dedicated and balanced
mentorship team by my side. Nina – thank you for your enthusiasm, your cats (real and
metaphorical), and your vegan mush. Mike – thank you for modeling optimism and kindness.
Camille – thank you for encouraging me to explore. And Krystale – thank you for your
unbelievable generosity, your integrity, and your empathy. I would not have been in graduate
school were it not for you (a fact I do not hold against you); and without your continued
guidance, I certainly would not have finished in four years. From my first sociology class
through my dissertation defense, you encouraged me to set high bars for myself and then showed
me how to reach them. Nina, Mike, Camille, and Krystale – you all have shown me what good
mentorship looks like. As a professor, I hope to extend to my students the same compassion and
generosity you all extended to me.
Included among my mentors are the friends I made in the Department of Sociology at
USC. You all taught me how to navigate the small complexities of a graduate career – how to get
funding during the summer, who to talk to about the printer, what snacks to bring to oral
qualifying exams. This peer-mentorship was essential to my success in the program. I am
iv

appreciative also of the relationships we built over hummus, coffee, french fries, and beer. Our
conversations helped push my work in more fruitful directions and reminded me why I love
sociology. Perhaps more importantly, though, we learned together how to not talk about
sociology all the time, another important skill for making it through a Ph.D. program.
Lastly, to my friends and family outside of USC. Thank you for your forgiveness when I
shortsightedly prioritized work over our relationships. Thank you for listening patiently when I
spent an entire year threatening to drop out. Thank you for sharing so much good food and wine,
and for reminding me that a whole world exists outside of my mind (a world that does not
particularly care about my tricky R&R, my failed file backup, or my job market anxieties).

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………………ii

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………..…..iii

Summary Abstract………………………………………………………………………………..vi

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………..…1

Chapter 1: Manufacturing Volunteer Embeddedness in an Anti-Gender-Based Violence
Organization………………………..………………………………………………...15

Chapter 2: Rhetorical and Organizational Typification of Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault,
and Stalking as Discrete Forms of Violence…………………….…………………...39

Chapter 3: How Organizational Architecture Stymies Criminal Justice Reform: Evidence from
an Anti-Gender-Based Violence Organization………………………………….…...70

Chapter 4: “When you’re here, you’re not a militant feminist”: Managing Institutional
Complexity in an Anti-Gender-Based Violence Organization……………….……...98

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...135

References………………………………………………………………………………………139

vi

SUMMARY ABSTRACT
Gender-based violence – including rape, domestic violence, and stalking – remains common in
the United States. Nonprofit race crisis centers, in partnership with federal and local
governments, have emerged as a primary response to violence. This dissertation draws on three
years of ethnographic observation in a rape crisis center and 40 in-depth interviews with
volunteers and staff to understand the challenges faced by these frontline workers when
providing social services to victims of violence. What follows are four papers, each of which
expands social problems theory or organization theory to explain a distinct paradox or
shortcoming in service provision. I show how organizational features – staffing, paperwork,
physical architecture, and funding structures – limit some victims’ access to services and set
others up with services ill-suited to their needs. These organizational conditions constrain
individuals’ actions even when cultural conditions support more effective service provision
strategies. Viewed at arm’s length, this dissertation shows how organizations connect broad
structural conditions to street-level action. The focus on the tangible features of organizations
advanced here helps explain how social structures like culture and political arrangements
produce – or fail to produce – particular actions on the ground.

1

INTRODUCTION
Gender-based violence, an umbrella term that includes sexual assault, domestic violence, and
stalking, remains a common occurrence in the United States (Black et al. 2010; Morgan and
Oudekerk 2019; Truman and Morgan 2016). During their lifetime, one in three women will
experience sexual violence and half will experience domestic violence. Men, too, experience
violence – one in six can expect to experience sexual violence, and one in three reports domestic
violence. Over the past five decades, a large violence prevention field populated by state, for-
profit, and nonprofit entities has coalesced to confront this problem. The four papers collected in
this dissertation help explain both the successes and shortcomings of this hybrid field’s common
responses to gender-based violence.
The gender-based violence field is just one example of the coming-together of multiple
sectors of society to address “wicked” -- intractable and complex -- social problems (Kettl 2006).
I treat the anti-gender-based violence field as a case of social service provision in the hybrid
welfare state more broadly. Since the 1980s, state provision of cash-based assistance to solve
individuals’ problems has shrunk, replaced instead by “services” – job training, counseling,
rehabilitation, and more – oftentimes provided by networks of nonprofit, state, and private actors
(Clemens and Guthrie 2010). Many scholars map the contours of this new welfare landscape,
tracking relative dollars spent, clients reached, and services offered (Salamon et al. 2013). These
accounts are generally critical, showing how state resources are stretched thin and hard-to-reach
populations are underserved (Allard 2017; Fernandez 2007; INCITE! 2017). Comparatively little
scholarship, however, explores how the people providing services – the street-level nonprofit
employees – navigate these new institutional arrangements (Krause 2014). This dissertation
focuses primarily on the organizational rather than institutional level, identifying the day-to-day
2

features of nonprofit organizations that stymie effective service provision. Through this project, I
advance empirical literatures on both gender-based violence and social welfare by asking how
organizational conditions create challenges for service providers and their clients. In answering
my empirical questions about service provision, I also advance social problems and organization
theories and produce tools useful beyond my empirical case.
THE CASE OF GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE
Since gender-based violence was first defined as a social problem in the 1960s and
1970s, research on the subject has proliferated (Brownmiller 1975; Bumiller 2010; Echols 1989).
Early feminist activists, who were themselves sometimes scholars, shifted public perceptions of
violence that had long occurred within intimate romantic relationships. Rather than
understanding sexual and domestic violence as normal features of relationships, feminists
redefined these social phenomena as problems. Activists pushed for tougher policing and
prosecutorial practices and lobbied for legal reforms that expanded the range of prosecutable
actions (Richie 2012).
Much early scholarship, and some contemporary work, focuses on criminal-legal
responses to violence (Berk and Loseke 1980; Bumiller 2010; Emerson 1979; Koss and Harvey
1987; Parnas 1972; Roy 1977). Because early feminists defined sexual and domestic violence
as criminal problems (as opposed to moral or medical problems, for example), inertia produced
an academic environment in which many studies of gender-based violence focused on its
treatment by the criminal-legal system (Bumiller 2009; Goldscheid et al. 2015; LaFree 1989;
Loseke 1992). Researchers are interested in rates of reporting, and the progression of gender-
based violence reports through the criminal-legal system. Scholars and activists note how victims
of gender-based violence are processed by the criminal-legal system differently based on race,
3

class, legal status, or fit with an ideal victim script (Richie 2012; Sweet 2019). This line of
scholarship shows largely how the criminal-legal system (and the medical profession intimately
connected with it) fails victims of violence (Martin 2005; Mulla 2014).
The gender-based violence literature’s focus on criminal-legal systems, while important,
is disconnected from the experience of violence on the ground. Most victims of violence never
come into contact with the criminal-legal system. Only ten-to-fifteen percent of sexual violence
victims file police reports (Wolitzky-Taylor et al. 2011). About twelve percent of domestic
violence victims report their experiences to the police (Voce and Boxall 2018). These numbers
are lower for marginalized populations – people of color, gender and sexual minorities, and
undocumented victims are all less likely to report (Aizer 2010; Bumiller 2010; Langenderfer-
Magruder et al, 2016; Orloff, Jang, and Klein 1995). Rather than reporting to the police, most
victims seek help from their family, friends, and social welfare providers, including both private
healthcare providers and nonprofit providers (Kaukinen 2004).
Although much research on gender-based violence centers the criminal-legal and medical
systems (Goldscheid et al. 2015), some scholarship does take private care providers as its focus.
These accounts, most of which study nonprofit service providers, generally advance either
symbolic or materialist explanations for the persistence of gender-based violence. Symbolic
accounts consider the meaning attached to violence within nonprofit anti-gender-based violence
organizations (Messner 2016; Messner, Greenberg, and Peretz 2015; Nichols 2013; Sweet 2019;
Zilber 2002). These scholars track how understandings of and responses to violence have shifted
since the inception of the women’s movement in the 1960s. Whereas violence was first
understood as a problem of patriarchy, professionalization and its associated influx of nonprofit
professionals shifted conceptualizations towards more carceral or medical models.
4

Materialist accounts track shifting funding structures. As feminist activists partner more
actively with “the state” – generally law enforcement officials, the courts, and public health
professionals, best-practice responses to violence shift (Corrigan 2013; Markowitz and Tice
2002; Martin 2005). New partnerships produce a prioritization of an individualized social
welfare response to violence, rather than a structural anti-patriarchal or economic justice
response. Both symbolic and materialist critiques of nonprofit service providers link service-
providers’ challenges to broad changes in the structural landscape.
Largely missing from these critical accounts of nonprofit social service providers is
attention to how structural conditions are translated into action by workers on the ground. Street-
level nonprofit service providers – volunteers, counselors, and caseworkers – rarely, if ever,
interact with their funding agencies. How, then, do the structural conditions of new funding
arrangements or meanings introduced through external partnerships translate into hindered
service provision at the street level? Limited street-level work focuses on how workers in
nonprofit anti-gender-based violence organizations deal with constraints placed upon them by
larger social structures (Greenberg 2019; Kolb 2014). My work, beyond describing constraints,
demonstrates how organizations operate as a theoretical link between structure and action. I
show how organizational conditions – the static features of a formal organization – serve as the
intermediary between field-level structures and street-level work, an observation missed by
existing street-level research. I show how static features like paperwork, personnel, and
architecture, introduced by structural conditions but maintained beyond them, produce barriers to
service provision on the ground.
THE HYBRID WELFARE STATE
5

Although this dissertation focuses empirically on the anti-gender-based violence field, I
conceptualize it more broadly as a case of hybridity in the neoliberal welfare state. Services for
victims of gender-based violence may not resemble our typical conceptions of “welfare.” What
counts as social welfare (i.e. what standard of living people in society can reasonably expect),
however, has always changed over time and place (Marshall 1964). During the AIDS epidemic
of the 1980s, nonprofit organizations pushed the state to increase care for patients (Epstein 1996;
Levitt and Rosenthal 1999). Now, people living with HIV or AIDS in many parts of the U.S. can
expect their antiretroviral therapies to be paid for by the state. During the Progressive Era,
grassroots organizations and formal nonprofits pushed the state to develop safe playgrounds,
tenements, and pensions (Fabricant and Fisher 2002; Katz 1986; Skocpol 1992).
Like with AIDS care and Social Security, providing services for victims of gender-based
violence was not considered a state responsibility before the intervention of activists (Echols
1989; Martin 1990). Beginning the 1960s, activists, first in grassroots associations but quickly in
formal nonprofit organizations, called on the state to better care for victims of violence. By the
1970s, many local and state governments were providing funding to nonprofit anti-gender-based
violence organizations to staff 24-hour hotlines and battered women’s shelters. The involvement
of the state in victims’ services expanded massively in the 1990s with the passage of the
Violence Against Women Act (Biden 1993; Whittier 2016). Today, most funding for victims’
services comes from the state, suggesting that care for victims of gender-based violence has
become fully entrenched as “social welfare” in the United States.
6

Above, I claim that anti-gender-based violence organizations are an example
of hybridity in the neoliberal welfare state, not just of welfare itself. By hybridity
1
I mean the
coming together of multiple sectors of society – public and private -- to provide social welfare.
Scholarly attention to this type of hybridity has increased since the 1980s when academics across
sociology and public administration noticed the increasing nonprofitization and privatization
associated with Reagan’s welfare reform. As the neoliberal state, interested in the empowerment
of individuals as consumers, shrunk what it perceived to be the encroachment of the government
into the lives of individuals, nonprofit organizations increasingly filled the void left behind.
Where the state previously provided financial assistance directly to individuals, the state in a
neoliberal welfare regime provides grants to nonprofits who then provide services to individuals
– job-seeking, integration, mental and physical healthcare, victims’ services, education, cultural
advancement, and more. Because of this cross-sectoral collaboration, scholars refer to this new
regime as the “hybrid” welfare state.
Tying this regime to Reagan’s neoliberal policies is a bit ahistorical (McCarthy 2003).
Nonprofits, for-profits, and private citizens have long collaborated with the state to provide
social welfare in the United States (Addams 1911; Fabricant and Fisher 2002). Before the Great
Depression, private charities were seen by many as the ideal providers of social welfare. For the
state to provide care to its citizens, it was argued, would be paternalistic and would deny citizens
of their independence (Hasenfeld and Garrow 2012; Leff 1973). Still, practices pioneered by
nonprofits did become incorporated by the state. Nonprofits served as creative, flexible program
developers; the state adopted what worked (Mohr and Guerra-Pearson 2010). Following the

1
Scholars use multiple terms to describe a similar phenomenon. The contracting regime (Smith 1993), the hollow
state, the mixed social economy (Ferris and Graddy 1999), devolution and decentralization (Haney 2010) all
capture similar types of collaboration between state, private, and not-for-profit entities.
7

Great Depression, nonprofits encouraged the state to do more for its citizens (Clemens and
Guthrie 2010). Confronted by mass unemployment and insecurity, the inability of private charity
alone to secure a basic standard of living became apparent (Piven and Cloward 1977). Following
mass protests, the welfare state expanded. The regime shifted once again alongside the neoliberal
turn in U.S. politics, away from state provision of care and towards a downsized, decentralized,
and deregulated hybrid welfare regime (Harvey 2005; Prasad 2006).
While some scholars of hybridity may deemphasize longstanding collaborations between
sectors, they are correct in their assessment of the neoliberal turn towards hybridity as unique.
Since the 1980s, the scale of the nonprofit sector has grown immensely. In both the sheer number
of organizations and the state funding allocated to them, the current nonprofit field dwarfs its
predecessors. Most scholarship on the current nonprofit fields tracks its structural contours – its
size, resources, areas of work, and geographic spread. This work is primarily descriptive in its
discussion of a new empirical phenomenon, the privatized and devolved welfare state (Gronjberg
and Salamon 2002; DeVita and Twombly 2006; Smith 2006). More critical scholarship also
explores the consequences of the new structural regime for the provision of social welfare.
Scholars working at a macrostructural level argue that nonprofit reliance on contracts stunts their
innovation (Gronbjerg 2001); that nonprofit saturation in major metropolitan centers reduces
access to care for rural citizens (Allard 2017); that local government leaders wield outsized
control over the distribution of resources (Hasenfeld 2000; Brodkin 2007); and that difficult-to-
reach clients get left out (Fernandez 2007; Milward and Provan 2000).
Missing from the picture, however, is attention to how these structural features translate
into practice on the ground. Organization-level analyses are especially important in this context
given early public administration scholars’ attention to how street-level social service providers
8

create policy through their interactions with clients (Lipsky 2010). While macro-level structures,
like funding regimes and state policies, may suggest at the contours of a new welfare state,
street-level workers, through their creative interpretations of structural constraints, bring
unexpected texture to policy.
Some literature does examine the experiences of street-level workers in the nonprofitized
welfare state. This work primarily tackles the institutional complications for workers on the
ground. Each sector has its own institutional logics – or sets of rules, norms, and beliefs (Scott
2013; Thornton and Ocasio 1999). In the welfare provision context, scholars show that the logics
adhered to by representatives of the state differ from those of nonprofit professionals, which
differ again from volunteers (Henriksen, Smith, and Zimmer 2015). A relatively young body of
literature explores how street-level workers interactionally negotiate these institutional
complications (McPherson and Sauder 2013; Reay et al. 2016; Zilber 2002). While useful for my
street-level work, this research largely misses a more evaluative assessment of how institutional
complications impact the provision of services to clients. This dissertation contributes to the
literature on the hybrid welfare state by showing how new organizational and institutional
arrangements shape the provision of services to clients on the ground.
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE CENTER FOR HEALTHY FUTURES
To better understand the emergence and persistence of barriers to effective social welfare
provision, I have chosen as my fieldsite a single anti-gender-based violence organization, called
pseudonymously the Center for Healthy Futures (CHF). In adherence with accepted ethnographic
site selection practices, I sought a theoretically rich fieldsite, not necessarily one most
representative of the field (Gong 2019; Katz 2012; Yin 2003). Because of my interest in
hybridity, I wanted a fieldsite with extensive, enduring relationships with cross-sectoral partners.
9

CHF, which was founded in the early 1970s, has been collaborating with city and state
policymakers, state agencies, and private philanthropies since its inception. It was one of the first
organizations in the nation to develop a Community Coordinated Response program – domestic
violence response teams that bring together volunteer counselor-advocates, state law
enforcement officers, and private medical professionals (Garner and Maxwell 2008). CHF also
developed prevention programs in collaboration with public education professionals,
philanthropy, and policymakers that have been adopted by organizations nationwide. These rich
cross-sectoral relationships, while atypical in their longevity and depth, make CHF an ideal
location for studying the theoretical phenomenon of hybridity.
CHF boasts a staff of about 65 full-time employees and over 200 volunteers. Employees
handle recurring and professionalized work – grant-writing, payroll, media, and long-term
therapeutic and legal counseling. Volunteers serve as many clients’ initial contact with the
organization. They staff the organization’s 24-hour crisis hotline, provide advocacy at police
stations and forensic medical examinations, and conduct prevention trainings in middle and high
schools. All volunteers go through extensive training and agree to volunteer for at least one year,
creating a paraprofessionalized labor pool. Every year, CHF serves over 10,000 clients through
its hotline, direct advocacy, and prevention programs, making it the largest anti-gender-based
violence organization in Los Angeles.
I spent three years as a participant observer with CHF, from January of 2017 through
January of 2020. I began as a volunteer counselor-advocate, participating in the 72-hour training
program and then volunteering weekly on a domestic violence response team. This experience
was particularly useful in getting to know the organization’s culture because all staff members
participate in the same training program. After a year, I joined the prevention division,
10

participating in their alternative 65-hour training program, then leading prevention events one-to-
three times per month afterward. Finally, during my last year of participant observation, I began
serving as a “coach” for both intervention and prevention training – a veteran volunteer who
leads exercises, assists with trainings, and answers new volunteers’ questions.
During my time in the field, I wrote extensive fieldnotes. While in the field, I took
jottings either by hand or on my cell phone. Upon exiting the field, I typed jottings into extended
fieldnotes, which were later subjected to open coding and iterative memoing to identify emergent
themes. Each of the four papers that comprise this dissertation stems from an empirical
contradiction or problem identified during the coding and memoing process. Because my
theoretical interest is in street-level workers’ navigation of hybridity, I focused during data
collection on workers – their interactions with one another, their reflections on service provision,
their daily required tasks – rather than on the experiences of clients. When clients’ stories of
violence emerge in the data, I use them only as they relate to workers’ experience. My focus is
not on the empirical phenomenon of gender-based violence. I received approval through USC’s
Institutional Review Board prior to beginning data collection (UP-16-00730; UP-18-00398). All
research participants, in line with IRB protocol, provided their consent.
THE PAPERS
This dissertation is made up of four papers, each of which is either forthcoming or under
review at top journals in sociology, criminology, and public administration. Although the four
papers come together to advance a larger theoretical project, they do cohere as discrete
contributions. Because they were written to stand independently from one another, there is some
repetition, particularly in sections on methodology, between papers. No data, however, are
repeated between papers.
11

Each paper deals with a specific substantive issue – a tension, inconsistency, or oversight
in CHF’s provision of social services. In answering each question about hindered service
provision, I develop theory useful for understanding both the specific problems I identify and
also similar problems endemic to hybrid organizations more broadly. I organize this dissertation
by level of theoretical generalizability. The contributions made in the first paper are useful
largely for nonprofits that rely on volunteer labor. Each subsequent paper makes a larger
contribution, first to social problems theory, theories of punishment and organizations, and
finally to neo-institutional and organization theory broadly.
The first paper, entitled “Manufacturing Volunteer Embeddedness in an Anti-Gender-
Based Violence Organization,” explains high rates of volunteer and staff turnover, a common
problem in social welfare organizations. I find that staff members use two distinct institutional
logics – or patterned sets of rules, norms, and beliefs – to recruit and retain essential volunteer
labor. The two logics, which I refer to as the activist logic and the careerist logic, bring in
workers who have very different motivations and expectations. This, I show, creates retention
and policy-adherence problems for CHF. This paper advances workplace theories of
embeddedness by showing how institutional logics operate as an ongoing, interactional strategy
for producing committed workers. Neoinstitutional theory is also advanced through my focus on
the outcomes of hybridity, not only the process by which hybridity occurs.
The second paper, entitled “Rhetorical and Organizational Typification of Domestic
Violence, Sexual Assault, and Stalking as Discrete Forms of Violence,” explains why CHF treats
three forms of violence as discrete from one another despite workers’ knowledge that violence
frequently co-occurs. I advance social problems theory by showing that CHF’s training syllabi
12

and paperwork – its organizational features -- not just political arguments, produce the
paradoxical treatment of each form of violence as discrete.
The third paper, “How Organizational Architecture Stymies Criminal Justice Reform:
Evidence from an Anti-Gender-Based Violence Organization,” builds on the theoretical
foundations of the previous paper to show how organizational architecture – a term I develop to
describe the static, tactile features of organizations – make reformative criminal justice action
challenging. I show that CHF staff and volunteers largely advocate alternatives to incarceration
and restorative conflict resolution practices in cases of gender-based violence. Despite their
desire for reform, however, their day-to-day practices advance a carceral agenda. In this paper, I
argue that the hard features of the organization – its physical building, its paperwork, and its
entrenched personnel – make reformative action difficult. I advance theories of punishment here
by showing that criminal-justice policy does not follow smoothly from ideology. Rather, sticky
organizational features make reform difficult long after ideology has shifted.
The final paper, “‘When you’re here, you’re not a militant feminist’: Managing
Institutional Complexity in an Anti-Gender-Based Violence Organization,” makes the most
direct contribution to neo-institutional theory. Current trends in the literature emphasize street-
level workers' creative capacity for modifying and deploying multiple institutional logics to
respond to varied situations. This literature resists early neo-institutional treatment of individuals
as bound by a scripted logic that tells them how to respond to every interaction. I push this
agentic take on neo-institutional theory to consider how individuals learn their creative strategies
for logic deployment. Using the case of CHF, I show that CHF staff members train new
volunteers on how to recognize and navigate competing rules, norms, and beliefs that emerge
when working with the organization’s law enforcement partners. For neo-institutionalism, this
13

demonstrates that creative negotiation of institutional complexity – the hallmark of the hybrid
welfare state – is itself a scripted behavior.
THE BIG PICTURE
Gender-based violence remains an entrenched social problem. Each paper in this
dissertation helps explain a shortcoming of social service providers’ responses to victims. I show
how volunteer recruitment strategies produce high rates of turnover and inconsistency in service
provision. I explain why victims who experience only one type of violence receive better
treatment than victims who experience co-occurring violence. I argue that organizational
conditions inhibit staff and volunteers from implementing reforms that would expand services to
underserved populations. And finally, I explain the persistence of potentially harmful cross-
sectoral ties.
My organizational approach to answering empirical questions about effective service
provision advances sociological and criminological literature on gender-based violence. While
extensive literature documents changing cultural and material responses to sexual and domestic
violence, much less research shows how these structural features translate into action on the
ground. This dissertation identifies organizational features – like building architecture,
paperwork, and staffing -- as the theoretical link between structural conditions and the
interactional work of street-level employees.
This theoretical insight, while derived from the anti-gender-based violence field, easily
extends out to all social service providers in the hybrid welfare state. Rape crisis centers are
emblematic of new welfare arrangements. Grassroots groups and formal nonprofit organizations
pressure the state to extend protections to new groups of people. In this context, activists in the
1960s and 1970s pressure local and federal policymakers to consider social services for victims
14

of violence – including hotlines, shelters, legal support, and counseling – as the responsibility of
the state. Today, nonprofit partner actively with private philanthropy and public government
agencies to provide these services. This cross-sectoral collaboration produces the “hybrid”
welfare state.
While the empirical questions answered apply largely to the gender-based violence
context, my theoretical insights are transferrable to other contexts with the hybrid welfare state. I
show how organizational features operate as the intermediary between structural conditions and
street-level action. This insight is useful for nonprofit scholars in sociology and public
administration who have spent outsized energy tracking the structural contours of the new hybrid
welfare state (how much money is there? where are services located? what kinds of services are
provided? who are the clients?) while largely ignoring the processes by which these structural
features translate into action on the ground. Each of the papers in the dissertation identifies
organizational or institutional phenomena useful in explaining this translation process.

15

Chapter 1:
Manufacturing Volunteer Embeddedness in an Anti-Gender-Based Violence Organization
ABSTRACT
Much nonprofit management literature explores the recruitment and retention of volunteer labor.
While existing literature describes the profile of committed volunteers, less research focuses on
the interactional strategies managers use to increase volunteer commitment. This article
addresses this gap by bridging the concept of “organizational embeddedness” from human
resource management literature to the nonprofit context. Drawing on 27 months of participant
observation in an anti-gender-based violence organization, I identify the deployment of
institutional logics, or patterned sets of motivations and values, as one mechanism for producing
volunteer embeddedness. I show how nonprofit staff strategically use both activist and careerist
logics to maintain volunteer commitment. This paper extends empirical research on volunteer
management by showing how staff actively manufacture commitment. I also advance theories of
embeddedness by discussing its production as an ongoing process rather than a static state.

16

Although nonprofit organizations are becoming increasingly professionalized (Hwang and
Powell 2009), many still do rely on volunteer labor to perform core organizational activities.
With labor valued near $200 billion annually, volunteers perform a major economic service for
the country, oftentimes in social welfare fields (Bowman 2009; Salamon et al. 2013). The value
of volunteer labor extends beyond the market, contributing to a civically-engaged democratic
society (Dodge and Ospina 2016). Because of the importance of volunteer participation in
nonprofit organizations, and because the cost of recruiting and training new volunteers is high
(Walk, Zhang, and Littlepage 2019), many scholars are interested in volunteer motivation and
retention (Wilson 2012).
Past scholarship has successfully applied insights from the for-profit corporations to the
nonprofit context, adapting techniques from human resource management to the uniqueness of
volunteers (Malinen and Harju 2016; Studer 2016). I build on this tradition here by extending the
concept of job embeddedness to the nonprofit context. Embedded employees – or those most
attached to their jobs – report higher levels of satisfaction, receive better performance
evaluations, and stay at their jobs longer (Ampofo et al. 2017). Because of the benefits of
embeddedness, much human resource and organizational management research identifies the
characteristics of embedded employees. Features associated with job embeddedness in for-profit
contexts, like overlapping goals and justifications, are also associated with volunteer motivation
in nonprofits (Englert, Thaler, and Helmig 2019). Largely missing from both the for-profit and
nonprofit literature, however, is attention to how volunteer motivation is actively produced. I
explore here the techniques nonprofit managers use to promote volunteer job embeddedness.
17

This paper draws on 27 months of participant observation in an anti-gender-based
violence organization
2
to understand how staff members manufacture volunteer embeddedness
within the organization. For-profit research shows that “fit” between employees’ and employers’
goals and values is important in predicting embeddedness (Holtom and O’Neill 2004). Nonprofit
research, too, demonstrates the importance of congruence between volunteers’ and
organizations’ motivations, goals, and outcomes. Analysis of my data shows that nonprofit staff
members strategically deploy multiple motivations for volunteering, what I call activist
motivations and careerist motivations, to promote volunteer embeddedness. Because these
multiple motivations sometimes conflict with one another, however, I show that motivations
sometimes breakdown, discouraging volunteer retention.
This paper extends empirical research on volunteer recruitment and retention by showing
how nonprofit managers strategically deploy multiple motivations to increase volunteer
embeddedness. Nonprofit professionals may be interested in intentionally accommodating
volunteers with diverse values and goals. I also identify a pitfall of this strategy, however,
showing how, when organizations fail to follow-through on promised motivation-
accommodations, volunteer embeddedness decreases.
I also extend theoretical research on job embeddedness more broadly here by exploring
the interactional process of embeddedness promotion. My ethnographic data show that
promoting embeddedness is an ongoing process. While managers may succeed in creating ties
between workers and the organization in some contexts, in others competing goals may inhibit

2
The term “gender-based violence,” refers generally to intimate partner violence and sexual violence, explicitly
recognizes that violence flows generally in gendered directions, from male perpetrators towards female victims.
Justifications for violence often also rest on cultural beliefs about gender (Armstrong, Gleckman-Krut, and Johnson,
2018).
18

embeddedness. This suggests that embeddedness is less a dichotomous switch that is either on or
off, and rather a state produced through interaction that shifts over time and between contexts.
JOB EMBEDDEDNESS
Much nonprofit management scholarship draws on theoretical insights produced in for-
profit contexts. For example, volunteer management literature draws extensively on theories of
human resource management and organizational psychology (Brudney and Meijs 2014; Paull
2002). Although volunteers’ specific motivations for joining and staying in organizations differ
from paid employees, the importance of motivation congruence more broadly remains important
between contexts. I build on this history here by drawing on the concept of job embeddedness, a
strain of organizational research which, to my knowledge, has not yet been incorporated fully
into nonprofit literature.
Early attempts to understand why people stay in their jobs even when other, potentially
better, jobs are available to them resulted in theories of “job embeddedness” (Mitchell et al.
2001). Broadly understood, embeddedness is the set of factors producing attachment between
individuals and their jobs. Mitchell and colleagues propose links, fit, and sacrifice as three
characteristics influencing embeddedness. Links are emotional ties between employees and other
individuals in their organization, like colleagues and supervisors. Fit is coherence between
employees’ and organizations’ goals and values. Sacrifice is a strategic calculation made by
employees who determine how much it was cost, both economically and relationally, to move
jobs.
Later applications of this theory test the extent to which links, fit, and sacrifice predict
employee embeddedness. Research shows that, consistent with Mitchell et al.’s predictions, all
three shape employee turnover (Holtom and O’Neill 2004). Much literature since has explored
19

the implications of embeddedness: what are the outcomes of embeddedness for employers and
employees? Although some literature suggests that turnover is good for creativity because fresh
talent brings in new ideas, research shows that embeddedness increases innovation (Ng &
Feldman 2010). Embeddedness also protects against the costs of turnover, which include
recruitment, training, and hits to morale (Jiang et al. 2012). Embedded employees are also more
productive, and better at their jobs, than those who are less embedded (Lee et al. 2004;
Sekiguchi, Burton, and Sablynski 2008). Benefits to employers, then, are numerous.
Employees, too, benefit from their embeddedness. Embedded employees, operationalized
in some work as those who change jobs less frequently, make more than less embedded
employees (Hachen 1992; Hammida 2004). Embedded employees also report more social
support and emotional connections to their colleagues than less-embedded employees. While the
direction of causality may be reversed, the correlation does suggest that embedded employees
experience more psychological well-being than less-embedded employees (Feldman and Ng
2007).
Because embeddedness is largely associated with positive outcomes, employers and
researchers alike are interested in organizational and managerial factors producing
embeddedness. Unsurprisingly, organizational conditions like high wages and pensions correlate
positively with embeddedness (Smith, Holtom, and Mitchell 2011). More affective conditions,
though, like social relationships and goal overlap also shape embeddedness. Clear articulations
of an organization’s goals, both in recruitment and socialization, promote employee
embeddedness (Allen 2006; Breaugh and Starke 2000). Similarly, embedded employees report a
close fit between their goals and values and those of the organization, producing high levels of
20

affective commitment to their employer and engagement with their work (Ghosh et al. 2013;
Vance 2006).
Most literature relies on surveys or large-N datasets to study the relationship between
organizational and relational features and employee embeddedness. Researchers study
relationships between employees’ wages, pensions, perceptions of social support, goal clarity,
relationships with managers, and embeddedness (operationalized as tenure with their employer
or intention to switch jobs) at one point in time (Bambacas and Kulick 2013; Hom et al. 2009;
Singh, Shaffer, and Selvarajan 2018). Less attention is paid to how managers strategically
promote embeddedness on the ground. This paper begins addressing this gap by studying the
interactional embeddedness production practices of managers on the ground of an organization.
THE NONPROFIT CONTEXT
Just as for-profit organizations care deeply about worker embeddedness, nonprofit
organizations (NPOs), too, are invested in promoting volunteer retention. Although nonprofit
organizations, as they become increasingly professionalized, rely less on volunteer labor to
perform core organizational functions (Brudney, Lucas, and Meijs 2009), volunteers remain
important to many NPOs (Salamon et al. 2013). Volunteers both provide critical labor and lend
an aura of grassroots-ness to organizations seeking to embed themselves within communities.
Whereas paid professionals are sometimes received coolly by clients, volunteers, because of their
unremunerated status, are seen as purer and more genuinely caring, a feature sought by many
service providers (Hoogervorst et al. 2016). Because volunteer labor is important for nonprofits,
and their recruitment and training is costly, organizations seek to retain labor wherever possible
(McElroy, Morrow, and Rude 2001; Musick and Wilson 2008).
21

Much of the volunteering literature focuses on the demographic characteristics that make
somebody more likely to volunteer, and more likely to continue volunteer (Wilson 2012).
Education, for example, is a strong marker of civic engagement (as measured by participation in
nonprofit organizations), as is income level (Sundeen, Garcia, and Raskiff 2009). Race, too, and
gender, are associated with a person’s likelihood to volunteer (Mesch et al. 2006; Musick,
Wilson, and Bynum 2000). Although early charitable organizations in the United States were
more comfortable with selecting only wealthy and well-educated volunteers (Addams 1911),
organizations today cannot discriminate based on demographic characteristics (nor would most
nonprofits like to). A similar body of literature explores the organizational features, rather than
the volunteers’ features, that promote retention. An organization’s size, for example, shapes
volunteers’ tenure (Hager and Brudney 2011). While these studies are helpful for understanding
broad trends in volunteering, they do little to improve volunteer managers’ recruitment and
retention of volunteers.
A smaller literature intervenes in this conversation, identifying both management
techniques and volunteers’ qualitative experiences associated with successful recruitment and
retention. For example, successful nonprofit leaders expose volunteers repeatedly to the impact
of their work (Mayr 2017), build volunteers’ emotional connections to nonprofit missions (Farny
et al. 2018), and empower volunteers’ autonomy (Oostlander et al. 2014). Attention to individual
volunteers shows that volunteers motivated internally, rather than externally, have higher
retention rates (Bidee et al. 2013), and that fit between volunteers’ goals and the goals of the
organization promote commitment (Englert, Thaler, and Helmig 2019; Stukas et al. 2009).
While more useful for understanding how volunteers’ motivations, not only their
demographic characteristics, shape their commitment to volunteer work, the above body of
22

literature still does little to inform professional practice. I intervene here by exploring here how
nonprofit professionals produce volunteer embeddedness. I draw on organizational management
literature, using the term embeddedness to refer to workers’ attachment to their jobs. I also pay
special attention to features associated with embeddedness-promotion in for-profit contexts,
namely overlapping values and motivations, to inform my analysis of the nonprofit data.
INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS
Overlap between employees’ and employers’ goals, motivations, and values all matter
significantly for retention, both in for-profit and nonprofit contexts (Ghosh et al. 2013). These
mirror institutional logics, defined as patterned sets of goals, justifications, norms, and practices
(Scott 2013). Institutional logics both guide and justify organization members’ behaviors.
Aligning job embeddedness literature with institutional logics literature, I suggest that embedded
employees share institutional logics with their employers. This assertion is supported by some
institutional logics research, which shows that alignment between employee’s and organization’s
logics promotes the organization’s success (Battilana and Dorado 2010).
Organizational theorists show, though, that organizations oftentimes balance multiple
logics. Organizations never interface with only one stakeholder. They must balance one logic
when interacting with clients, for example, and another when working with board members.
Maintaining multiple logics, though sometimes beneficial (Dimitriadis et al. 2017; Smith and
Besharov 2019), can also result in internal conflict within organizations (Anteby and
Wrzesniewski 2014; Fiol, Pratt, and O’Connor 2009). This is especially true in nonprofit
organizations, which are hybrids blending civic and social service projects (Henriksen, Smith,
and Zimmer 2015; Kreutzer and Jager 2011). Just as organizations balance multiple goals,
employees, too, oftentimes have different reasons for joining organizations. Research in anti-
23

gender-based violence organizations, for example, shows frequent conflicts between members
interested in political change and members interested more in service provision (Zilber 2002).
Because the goals privileged by different logics sometimes interfere with one another,
much logics literature focuses on the management of these contradictions. Research on a youth
after-school program, for example, shows that volunteers’ expectations of their involvement
interfere with the nonprofits’ goal of supporting youth with their homework (Eliasoph 2011).
Scholars show that professionals develop many strategies for managing these sorts of tensions
(Eliasoph, Lo, and Glaser forthcoming). By strategically foregrounding certain logics during
different social moments, staff members balance relationships with multiple stakeholders and
accomplish organizational goals.
I extend this theoretical thinking here by identifying an additional benefit of the
successful management of multiple institutional logics: the production of embeddedness.
Building on the assertion that overlapping logics promote embeddedness, this paper looks at staff
members’ leveraging of multiple logics to appeal to volunteers holding different goals.
Specifically, I explore here the management of two logics emerging in other nonprofit contexts:
the careerist logic and the activist logic.
THE EMPIRICAL CASE
This paper draws on data collected in an anti-gender-based violence organization. The
movement against gender-based violence began in the late 1960s and 1970s (Echols 1989).
Feminist scholars and activists resisted common perceptions of domestic and sexual violence
(Loseke 1992; Tierney 1982). While the public largely viewed domestic violence as a private
dispute and sexual violence as a crime of isolated deviants, feminists argued that these crimes are
normal (Amir 1971, Brownmiller 1975). Early activists founded hotlines and advocacy groups,
24

calling for changes in policing and prosecutorial practices. The first organizations were founded,
funded, and staffed by volunteers. As the movement grew, though, activists began relying on
government and foundation money to operate. The anti-gender-based violence movement is now
largely professionalized (Markowitz and Tice 2002; Martin 2005; Messner, Greenberg, and
Peretz 2015).
As anti-gender-based violence organizations, like rape crisis centers and battered
women’s shelters, came to rely more and more on government and foundation grants, they had to
learn new skills like informal lobbying and grant writing (Markowitz and Tice 2002). Nonprofits
hired professionals to manage the complicated nexus of applications, measurement and
accountability practices. Through the 1980s and 1990s, as many social problems in the United
States became more medicalized, domestic and sexual violence, too, required new interventions
(Sweet 2015). While early activists advocated for a “sisters helping sisters” approach, with
women using their own experiences with violence to support one another, later organizations
turned to the helping professions. Nonprofits staffed themselves with professional social workers
and marriage and family therapists (Zilber 2002). Despite this increased professionalization,
volunteers are still essential to the functioning of many anti-gender-based violence nonprofits.
I studied a single nonprofit organization, the Center for Healthy Futures (CHF), located
in a large metropolitan center in the Western United States. CHF is typical of many anti-gender-
based violence organizations. Founded in the early 1970s, CHF has become increasingly
professionalized over the years. It now manages a budget of almost $4 million every year, most
of which comes from government grants and contracts. Despite its high level of
professionalization, CHF still depends heavily on volunteers. “We’re volunteer powered,” as the
25

organization’s executive director is fond of saying. The organization has a professional staff of
65 and over 200 regular volunteers.
Volunteers serve the highest number of clients of the organization. CHF provides both
emergency and prevention services. Emergency services include a 24-hour hotline, court and
hospital accompaniments, and domestic violence crisis counseling. Prevention includes events
and educational presentations with community groups, schools, and workplaces. Volunteers
perform much of this initial service provision, while staff handle longer-term services like
counseling and case management.
METHODS
I served both as an observant participant and participant observer with CHF. I began in
the winter of 2017 observing the 72-hour training program for emergency services volunteers. I
participated little during this early observation, instead quietly writing notes in the back of a
classroom-style conference room in CHF’s headquarters. This experience introduced me to
CHF’s culture and their way of talking about violence. Upon completion of training, I then began
participating more actively in the field, volunteering on the organization’s domestic violence
response team (DVRT). This team partners CHF volunteers with law enforcement officers to
respond to domestic violence incidents as they occur. Law enforcement handles reporting while
the volunteer provides crisis counseling and introduces victims to their options. Volunteering
weekly on this team from spring 2017 through spring 2019 provided me with a deep
understanding of how it feels to become invested in the organization (Wacquant 2015).
In the summer of 2018, I also observed CHF’s 65-hour prevention volunteer training.
This training prepares volunteers to implement the organization’s violence prevention curriculum
in middle and high schools, community groups, and workplaces. Topics include consent,
26

unhealthy relationships, domestic violence, and the systems of oppression. After completing this
training, I also began volunteering as a prevention volunteer, implementing presentations and
events once or twice a month.
Also included in the data are monthly in-service meetings, which generally include some
ongoing education and updates about changes in policies and procedures. Additionally, I
participated in multiple social events, from birthday parties to post-event commiserations at bars.
By building relationships with volunteers and staff through my observant participation, I
accessed spaces potentially closed to more distant researchers (Adler and Adler 2008). To
alleviate concerns that, by actively participating in the space, I skewed the data, I recorded all of
my interactions with field members. I include my own verbal responses to participants’ speech in
reporting my data, providing the reader with an opportunity to assess the cleanliness of the data.
In total, this paper draws on data collected over 27 consecutive months in the field,
amounting to over 750 hours of observational data. Data were originally collected as jottings
written while in the field, either on my cell phone or in a small notebook, depending on which
was less obtrusive at the time. Shortly after leaving the field each day, I typed jottings into
extended fieldnotes. While still in the field, I began coding data in line with a modified grounded
theory approach (Charmaz 2014). During initial rounds of coding, I attached descriptive and
process codes to individual lines of text (Saldaña 2011). For example, one early descriptive code
that eventually led to this paper’s focus was “Volunteer Motivation.” Memos written after
identifying variation in this early code revealed two primary motivations for involvement, which
became the organizing structure of this paper. Excerpts presented in the following section are
emblematic of themes that reached saturation during the coding process.
RESULTS
27

Although multiple logics emerge in CHF, I focus here on two most frequently used by
volunteers to explain their involvement with the organization. Some volunteers identify political
motivations. They volunteer in order to change the world by ending gender-based violence and
sending the message to political leaders that violence is not okay. They see themselves as part of
a broader movement for social justice, aligned with groups fighting for the rights of people of
color, undocumented people, queer people, and others. I call this logic the “activist logic.”
Others adhere more closely to what I call a “careerist logic.” These volunteers commit to CHF in
order to build their professional resumes. Some want jobs in social work, criminal justice,
counseling, or the nonprofit sector, and see volunteering with CHF as a sign of competence and
commitment. Others want jobs at CHF and know that the organization often promotes from its
own ranks. While these logics sometimes overlap, a long-observed phenomenon called “mixed-
motivations,” volunteers generally do express a more dominant adherence to one over the other
(although which logic dominates can change over time and place).
In this section, I show how CHF staff members and volunteers express commitment to
both activist and careerist logics. I pay special attention to how staff members’ expressions of
logics build rapport with volunteers. I also show how, in the organization’s “backstage,” staff
members express frustration with both the activist and careerist logics. This frustration suggests
that staff members’ frontstage excitement about logics is, at least partially, strategic.
The Activist Logic
Some volunteers express political motivations for joining CHF. Staff members, too, often
justify CHF’s existence using political arguments. In welcoming new intervention volunteers to
the organization, Dolly, CHF’s executive director, lifts up the organization’s social change
mission.
28

DOLLY: We’ve been about changing the world for about 48 years.
And we work at the most intimate level. Just sitting in silence, just
listening, makes all the difference. And that’s the kind of thing
that’s going to change the world. It’s about the healing in the
moment, then the healing of the world.
[Dolly then asks to hear form volunteers.]
DOLLY: Would you be willing to share, take a minute and reflect,
like, when you started, where you are now, and what impressed
you the most, what moved you the most, what did you learn about
yourself? Are you the same now? Is anything significantly
different? Did any lightbulbs go off about your life? About your
community?
[after a few moments of silence, volunteers begin sharing]
CHLOE: When I started off I was really excited of course, but I
was overwhelmed because the problem feels so big. It feels so
much deeper than we can go. But then the person who spoke about
domestic violence, I forgot her name. But her presentation was so
powerful. She emphasized stopping the generational violence. That
made me feel like, we can do this. Children will enter the world
without violence. They will never know violence. That’s what
we’re trying to do. Whole future generations will be impacted.
MEGAN: I feel like I’m more myself after finishing this training. I
have more tools and information to be myself, and to be the kind of
29

person I want to be in the world. I didn’t expect that. I came in
wanting to feel less hopeless in the face of what’s going on. I
wanted to feel like I’m doing something other than writing angry
posts on Facebook. I wanted to do the most immediately impactful
thing. I feel like I’ve actually gotten hope. I’m grateful for that,
and for everyone who was in the training.
While celebrating the graduation of new intervention training volunteers, both CHF staff
and volunteers adhere to an activist logic. The organization exists, according to the executive
director, to “change the world.” This mission resonates with Mara, who joined the organization
to create political change. For Megan and Chloe, CHF is a tangible way to express their political
identities and shape the world.
Although CHF staff celebrate volunteers’ activist logics in some spaces, in others
volunteers’ desire to create change proves frustrating. Once confronted with the realities of
volunteer work, volunteers sometimes feel disappointed. During their weekly volunteer shifts,
they do not see the big social change promised by staff members during training. During a
volunteer management meeting with both prevention and intervention staff, Jovi, the intervention
volunteer manager, voices frustration with volunteers’ expectation.
JOVI: Another problem is that they have expectations about what
volunteering is going to be like. We need to do a better job setting
reasonable expectations. Volunteers all think they’re gonna put on
a cape and be heroes. They want to be heroes.
AUTHOR: [laughing] But really they’ll just be sitting in a police
station for 5 hours?
30

Volunteers adhering to an activist logic want to create real social change. Volunteer work
is messy, though, and rarely results in clear success stories. Intervention volunteers, like the
police officers with whom they partner, face lots of downtime. Prevention volunteers, who often
provide only one presentation to any one group of students, rarely see the impacts of the
information they provide. For volunteers interested in “changing the world,” this lack of
observable outcomes can be frustrating.
Jovi expresses frustration with volunteers’ expectations. She criticizes volunteers for
wanting to be “heroes,” recognizing that the work requires some amount of tedium. While the
activist logic, with its heroic commitment to social change, strongly motivate volunteer
participation, CHF staff also see it as naïve. This behind-the-scenes frustration suggests that staff
members’ frontstage commitment to the activist logic is, at least in part, strategic. While they
know the actual work rarely results in obvious moments of social change, they also recognize the
importance of bringing volunteers in with the activist logic.
The Careerist Logic
While many volunteers do express a desire to change the world, others adhere more
closely to a careerist logic. Adherents to this logic see volunteering for CHF as a strategy for
advancing their professional lives. For some, volunteering is a beneficial addition to their job
resumes. Others volunteer for CHF hoping to eventually get hired on as staff. This possibility is
reflected by many CHF staff, who did start with the organization as volunteers.
During intervention training, for example, Elisa introduces Tara, an emergency services
coordinator, saying, “Tara started as a volunteer.” Elisa begins laughing, “it’s a common
trajectory.” For individuals wanting to work for CHF, then, volunteering first is a strategic career
31

move. Volunteers themselves recognize this. In the following excerpt, a volunteer wonders about
moving from volunteer to staff within the organization.
VOLUNTEER: If we want to apply for a job later on, do we have
to go through training again?
ELISA: No. I got hired on as a consultant 2 months after I finished
training, then I was part time, then full time. Once you graduate
training you’ll be added to an email list where we send out all of
our job openings. We give you all the first shot at jobs. To get a
staff member who isn’t a volunteer we have to train them. If we
hire a volunteer though, they’ve already been through training,
they’re already familiar with the organization and protocol.
Here a volunteer expresses interest in eventually working for CHF. Rather than brushing
the volunteers’ question as antithetical to volunteering’s ethos of the selfless donation of time
and resources, CHF staff support this logic. Staff recognize that, for many volunteers,
commitment to the organization comes with careerist strings attached. During new volunteer
orientation, Elisa hands out descriptions of the volunteer rather. Rather than framing the role
description in terms of an activist logic (this is how you will create social change, for example),
Elisa frames the role in careerist terms.
ELISA: We know a lot of people want to put this on their resume
and that’s totally okay. We give you the role description so you
can use that.
Later, during a monthly in-service, Charlotte, the prevention volunteer coordinator,
reminds volunteers to turn in their monthly timesheets. Timesheets, which document volunteers’
32

work in the field, are due to various funders at the end of every month. Hours spent providing
direct services is the best way to quantify CHF’s impact on the community. In asking volunteers
for their timesheets, though, Charlotte uses a careerist logic rather than an activist logic. She
could have said something about how timesheets help CHF access funding which is necessary to
provide services and advance the political project. Instead, she presents timesheets as integral to
volunteers’ professional goals.
CHARLOTTE: We really need your timesheets. If you email me
for a recommendation for school or a job later on, I go to your file
and that’s what I use to write the recommendation.
Both CHF volunteers and staff espouse careerist logics. CHF staff recognize that many
volunteers may join the organization not only out of the goodness of their hearts but also to
advance their professional careers. Rather than understanding these careerist motivations as
anathema to the organization’s social change mission, CHF members lean in to the
organization’s multiple goals. During an in-service, staff asked volunteers what keeps them
motivated in their work, and also shared their own motivations. Adriana, a domestic violence
specialist on staff, shares “I’m here because I need a job.” She laughs, “I have car payments!
How do I stay connected?” She pauses, thinking. “Accompaniments, even though I’m not
supposed to go on them anymore. They keep me grounded. Now my job is mostly just
paperwork.” Adriana balances her careerist and activist logics here. She recognizes that her work
does materially sustain her, while also sharing that accompaniments to courts and hospitals keep
her attached to the organization’s social change mission.
While CHF staff recognize that many members adhere to a careerist logic, dedication
only to professional advancement also causes frustration. Before a training session for new
33

prevention volunteers, for example, Charlotte, the prevention volunteer coordinator and I, talked
about the new class. Charlotte complains that volunteers often complete the training but do not
ultimately complete their year-long volunteer commitment.
CHARLOTTE: They [volunteers] treat it like professional
development. Professional development costs thousands of dollars,
that’s what they don’t understand.
Similarly, Violet, the prevention training coordinator, complains during a volunteer
management meeting that volunteers often leave the organization shortly after completing
training. “They don’t even do a single presentation,” she says. “I had a friend complete the
training but never do a presentation. Her Instagram profile still says “violence prevention at
CHF,” though,” Violet says while rolling her eyes.
Importantly, not all volunteers expressing identification with a careerist logic leave the
organization before completing their volunteer commitment. Many CHF staff members began as
careerist volunteers interested in someday working for the organization. Rather, the above
excerpts show that, despite CHF staff members’ frustrations with careerist logics, they still use
such logics to manufacture volunteer embeddedness.
Breakdown in Logics
As I show above, CHF staff and volunteers express commitments to both activist and
careerist logics. In showing staff members’ frustrations with both logics, I argue that institutional
logics are used strategically to recruit and maintain volunteers. Just as the logics sometimes fall
short for staff members, though, volunteers also identify gaps between stated missions and
organizational reality. In the next two excerpts, I track Grace’s career with CHF. She began with
34

the organization adhering closely to an activist logic. After over two years of volunteer work,
though, she decided her work with CHF did not meet her activist goals and quit.
In the following excerpt, Detective Maldonado presents on child victims of sexual
assault. Before his presentation, though, he asks volunteers why they decided to join CHF.
Volunteers go around the room, giving their answers. One
volunteer tells the detective that she wants to be a prosecutor and
sees volunteering as good experience (a careerist logic). Grace
shares, conversely, that she “wants to help the ladies.”
During a later private conversation with Grace, she tells me she feels all people should
volunteer for an organization like CHF to “learn how some people really live.” Grace, who
already has an established career, identifies closely with an activist logic here. Her goal with
CHF is to provide social support. She also feels like volunteering is important for civic
awareness.
Almost two years after Grace explains her commitment to the organization, she shares
her reasons for quitting. She and I are at a social event, where she tells me she is leaving the
organization.
GRACE: I’m quitting DVRT.
AUTHOR: [shocked] You’re not doing it anymore?! Why?
GRACE: Well, I still want to be involved, I’ll still do coaching
(training new volunteers) and stuff, but I just can’t do DVRT. I’m
sick of sitting in a police station doing nothing for 5 hours. I’ve
seen everything, been out on gang calls and sex abuse, so it was
okay at first. But now I’m just over it.
35

AUTHOR: Yeah, yeah. And you hate hotline, right (a callback to
an earlier conversation where Grace expressed her dislike of
hotline calls)?
GRACE: Yeah, I can’t do hotline. It’s not triage! It’s never an
emergency, like this guy just raped me, what do I do. It’s someone
who was assaulted 25 years ago and is traumatized and so she calls
the hotline once a week.
Here Grace explains her growing frustrations with the organization. Early in her
volunteer commitment, Grace was excited to serve her community. As she spent more time with
the organization, though, she found that she was not helping people in a way she felt she had
been promised. While her early work on the domestic violence response team felt meaningful,
the large amounts of downtime started to weigh on her. She has never enjoyed working on the
hotline because the types of clients who take advantage of the service do not match her
conception of a “good” client. This type of identification of clients as “good” or “bad” occurs in
many helping professions. To streamline their work, street-level workers must unofficially sort
clients (Lipsky 2010). Grace dislikes clients who do not fit into her activist logic. She prefers
supporting clients whose abuse is recent and acute, not clients struggling with the lingering
aftereffects of traumatic abuse.
This frustration occurs for individuals adhering to the careerist logic, too. Charlotte
volunteered with the organization for about two years before getting hired on as staff. In the
following series of excerpts, Charlotte responds strategically to a new volunteer’s question about
the possibility of getting hired on as staff, then later expresses her frustration to me about the
organization’s hiring policies.
36

VOLUNTEER: What’s the percentage of volunteers that gets hired
on as staff.
CHARLOTTE: It depends. The prevention division is really small,
but 4 out of the 7 people who work in prevention started as
volunteers. Emergency is a bigger program.
[Charlotte turns to Jovi, who manages emergency volunteers]
JOVI: I think everyone started as a volunteer except me.
CHARLOTTE: In order to work here you have to go through the
same training that volunteers go through. If you’re hired on then
we have to pay you to take the training.
Here, Charlotte and Jovi assure the volunteer that, while it is not guaranteed, many
volunteers often do join the professional staff. Later that evening, though, Charlotte and I went
out for drinks with other CHF staff. While at the bar, Charlotte complained to me about how
long it took her to get hired on as staff.
CHARLOTTE: I worked for them for free for two years. They
hired Edwin before me, and Rashad, even though neither of them
had been volunteers. I wasn’t even going to apply for this position,
but Violet [the prevention training coordinator] told me, just apply.
When I came in to interview with Dolly [the executive director],
she comes and [sticking out her hand], “Hi, I’m Dolly.” In my
head I was like, we’ve met 17 times. But I just smiled and nodded.
Although Charlotte encourages a volunteer about the potential for professional
advancement earlier in the night, she later expresses her frustration with CHF’s hiring practices.
37

CHF does not always hire internally. Charlotte, too, felt disrespected as a volunteer by the
executive director who did not learn her name despite her extended commitment to the
organization. This shows that staff use the careerist logic strategically to invite in volunteers
while recognizing contradictions within the organization.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Volunteers provide important labor to nonprofit organizations while also supporting
NPOs civic-mindedness. Because of their importance, and the high cost of recruitment and
training (McElroy, Morrow, and Rude 2001; Musick and Wilson 2008), nonprofit managers are
invested in increasing volunteer retention. Past nonprofit literature focuses largely on volunteers’
demographic characteristics or nonprofits organizational conditions associated with volunteer
commitment. I extend this literature by exploring the interactional strategies managers use to
produce volunteer commitment. Drawing on human resource management literature, I introduce
the concept of “organizational embeddedness” to the nonprofit literature, showing that fit
between volunteers’ and organizations’ values and motivations matters for workers’ attachment.
Recognizing that values and motivations are oftentimes patterned, called “institutional
logics” in organization theory, I identify two broad logics dominant in the Center for Healthy
Futures, my ethnographic fieldsite. Volunteers express a commitment to either an activist logic,
which centers a social change agenda, or a careerist logic, which centers individual professional
development. I find that nonprofit managers, rather than privileging one logic over the other, use
both logics strategically to increase volunteer recruitment and retention. The deployment of
multiple logics, while helpful for the recruitment of a wide variety of volunteers, also introduces
new hurdles for the organization, however. When logics break down, volunteers attracted to the
organization by that logic become less embedded.
38

I extend nonprofit management literature here by showing how volunteer commitment is
actively produced and changes over time. For nonprofit managers, these findings illustrate both
the benefits and dangers of the deployment of multiple logics. To effectively use multiple logics
to attract and retain volunteers, managers must continually maintain all logics over time. When
one logic begins to dominate over another, volunteers’ attachment can become compromised.
I also extend theoretical research on embeddedness by showing that workers are not
either embedded or not. Rather, embeddedness shifts over time in reaction to managers’
successful maintenance of workers’ preferred logics. As institutional theorists show, multiple
logics compete for dominance within organizations (Battilana and Dorado 2010; Zilber 2002).
When logics between less central, even if only momentarily, I find that the volunteers who
identify with that logic become less attached to the organization. This encourages scholars of
embeddedness to pay more attention to the process of embeddedness production, rather than to
workers’ static identifications as either embedded or not.

39

Chapter 2:
Rhetorical and Organizational Typification of Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault, and Stalking
as Discrete Forms of Violence
Paper forthcoming at Social Problems
ABSTRACT
Despite constructions of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking as discrete forms of
violence, research shows that violence often co-occurs. Victims experiencing multiple forms of
violence require different interventions than victims experiencing only one. Service providers’
understandings of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking as discrete, then, potentially
undermine their goal of effective intervention. Drawing on 26 months of participant observation
in an anti-gender-based violence nonprofit organization, I explore how advocates construct each
form of violence as independent from the others. Results show that both organizational features,
like training curricula and organizational jurisdictions, and rhetorical strategies, like an
underemphasis on co-occurring violence, contribute to the construction of each type of violence
as discrete. This paper is of interest to researchers, practitioners, and policymakers committed to
designing and implementing effective responses to gender-based violence. I also advance social
problems theory, showing that organizational features, not just interactional processes, contribute
to typification.

40

Criminal codes and service providers alike largely treat domestic violence (DV), sexual assault
(SA), and stalking as discrete forms of violence. Although definitions vary by state and between
service organizations, DV is understood most broadly as harm occurring within the context of
intimate sexual and romantic relationships
3
, SA as unwanted sexual interaction, and stalking as
unwanted patterned and ongoing contact (Breiding et al. 2014; Freedman 2013; Lowney and Best
1995). Each emerged as a social problem during a unique historical moment. DV and SA were
identified as social problems during the 1960s and 1970s by feminist activists involved in
consciousness-raising groups (Echols 1989). Stalking emerged as a social problem later, following
high-profile cases of celebrity stalking in the 1980s and 1990s (Finch 2001). Treatment is often
siloed into rape crisis centers or DV agencies, with each type of organization tasked with
addressing only one form of violence.
Despite the constructions of each as independent from the others, however, DV, SA, and
stalking often co-occur. As many as one in three sexual assaults occur within intimate partnerships
(Peterson et al. 2019). SA is often one strategy employed by abusive partners in DV relationships
to maintain power and control (Hume 2018). Behaviors associated with stalking, too, often occur
within abusive intimate relationships (Gerbrandij et al. 2018). Because effective interventions vary
for victims experiencing co-occurring violence and single-type violence (Stalans, Hacker, and
Talbot 2010), the construction of each as independent from the others limits effective social service
provision.
In this paper, I draw on over two years of participant observation in an anti-gender-based
violence nonprofit organization to learn how advocates construct each form of violence as discrete.

3
DV here refers exclusively to violence within intimate sexual or romantic relationships (i.e. “intimate partner
violence”), not to other forms of violence occurring in domestic spaces like child or elder abuse (i.e. “family
violence”).
41

Specifically, I find both rhetorical strategies and organizational features that maintain three
separate forms of violence. Rhetorically, during training advocates presented “pure” examples of
violence, rather than presenting examples of messier co-occurring abuse. This creates disconnects
between advocates’ understandings of violence and victims’ actual experiences with violence.
Organizational features included government grants to the nonprofit organization requiring its
training to provide separate educational presentations on DV, SA, and stalking and city contracts
limiting the types of violence to which organizations may respond. These features constrained
advocates’ ability to respond adequately to violence as it emerges in victims’ lives. These
organizational and rhetorical features matter because victims experiencing multiple types of
violence require different types of interventions than victims experiencing only one, suggesting
that victims of violence may be inconsistently served.
I draw on social problems theory to explain how SA, DV, and stalking are maintained as
discrete forms of violence. Scholars show that, when working to construct a condition as a social
problem, claimsmakers identify characteristics of a “typical” case, a process called typification
(Best 2017). Shared understandings, or schema, of a typical case allow the public to talk about the
problem and policymakers to craft interventions. Later, social problems workers -- the people
tasked with dealing with the problem -- use the established schema to categorize conditions as
problems or not, and to determine appropriate responses. Typical cases are like Weber’s “ideal
types:” hypothetical abstractions used to sort and understand complex social phenomena
(Rosenberg 2016; Weber 2012 [1904]). Although ideal types, which are the purest distillations of
social phenomena, rarely exist in the social world, they are useful for organizing social action.
Theories of typification draw on ethnomethodology, a research strategy showing how
social reality is accomplished through interactions (Kim and Berard 2009). Social problems
42

theorists use this methodology to study how people make some condition into a problem through
their interactions with one another. I extend social problems theory by showing how, in addition
to rhetorical typification strategies like talking about only ideal forms of violence, organizational
conditions also play a role in typification processes. I call this “organizational typification.” In this
paper, I identify training curriculum and organizational jurisdictions as conditions that maintain
DV, SA, and stalking as independent from one another.
This paper also extends empirical research on gender-based violence by showing how DV,
SA, and stalking are reproduced as discrete forms of violence despite academic and practitioner
knowledge of their co-occurrence. Staff teach volunteers to respond to each form of violence
independently from the others. When confronted with victims experiencing multiple forms of
violence, however, advocates may struggle to identify ideal responses. This means that victims of
violence who do not fit neatly into an ideal type of violence may not receive the services they need
to heal from past violence and avoid future harm. This paper, in identifying the rhetorical and
organizational features of CHF maintaining potentially harmful typifications of violence, might
inform practitioner and policymakers’ attempts to make service provision more effective.
I begin this paper by tracking how SA, DV, and stalking emerged as discrete social
problems. I then problematize this definitional fragmentation, showing that each form of violence
often occurs alongside the others. Then, I introduce social problems theory as useful in
understanding how these discrete definitions are established and maintained. Next, I outline my
approach to data collection and analysis, and briefly introduce my ethnographic fieldsite. Then, I
present the results, starting with rhetorical typifications of violence before introducing
organizational typifications. I conclude with a discussion of how my identification of
43

organizational typification contributes to social problems theory, and how my empirical results
might make practitioner and policymaker attention to gender-based violence more effective.
The Emergence of Sexual Assault, Domestic Violence, and Stalking as Social Problems
Feminist activists began defining sexual violence as a social problem in the late 1960s and
early 1970s (Brownmiller 1975; Echols 1989). Prior to feminists’ interventions, the blame for
sexual violence was often placed on victims. When responding to cases of sexual violence, police
officers and judges asked about victims’ past relationships with attackers, about their consumption
of alcohol, their dress, and their alleged flirtatiousness (Berk and Loseke 1980; Goodman‐
Delahunty and Graham 2011; Roy 1977). Feminists pushed back against this individualization of
the problem by defining sexual assault as a common experience. During consciousness-raising
groups, women learned that their experiences with violence were not unique, thereby raising
domestic violence from a private trouble to a public issue (Mills 1959). Sexual violence came to
be understood as a social rather than personal problem stemming from a patriarchal system’s
unwillingness to address men’s violence (Brownmiller 1975; Messner 2016). Advocates created
rape crisis centers and hotlines to provide victims of sexual violence with crisis counseling. They
also worked to establish partnerships with law enforcement agencies and medical professionals to
ensure victims were taken seriously and provided with the services they needed (Schmitt and
Martin 2007).
4

At the same time, a somewhat separate group of activists began shifting understandings of
and responses to domestic violence (Loseke 1992). Rather than conceptualizing it as a private
matter between intimates, feminists defined domestic violence as a social problem (Dobash and

4
Although activists succeeded in problematizing law enforcement officers’ behavior, I recognize that victim-
blaming does continue today. See Goodman-Delahunty and Graham (2011) for an investigation of how victims’
intoxication and attire shape officers’ perceptions of responsibility.
44

Dobash 1979). To address domestic violence, activists founded early battered women’s shelters,
often run out of volunteers’ homes (Pizzey 1977). Other activists called for institutional change
rather than relying on grassroots, ad hoc organizations. Activists critiqued law enforcement
behavior, asserting that police responding to DV calls, for example, sometimes blamed women for
their victimization (Berk and Loseke 1980; Roy 1977). Activists worked with law enforcement to
shift policies and increase rates of prosecution. As the movement professionalized, the grassroots
organizations increasingly transformed into formal nonprofits and partnered actively with the state
(Bumiller 2010).
Unlike SA and DV, stalking did not emerge as a social problem until the late 1980s and
early 1990s (Finch 2001). Activists’ efforts were largely definitional (Westrup and Fremouw
1998). While behaviors now associated with stalking, like frequent unwanted contact or
unsolicited gifts, had long been observed, they were thought of as a symptom of domestic abuse,
not as a discrete form of violence. By legally defining stalking, activists were able to advocate for
increased funding for gender-based violence prevention organizations. Because responses to SA
and DV were, by this time, already institutionalized within feminist organizations, stalking
activists housed their efforts inside already-existing organizations, oftentimes DV agencies.
While early activists relied on grassroots funding and volunteer labor to campaign for
change, the state, convinced of the problems’ severity, has since gotten on board (Biden 1993;
Messner, Greenberg, and Peretz 2015). State governments first started funding rape crisis centers
in the 1970s through social service or criminal justice and corrections departments (Matthews
1994). Later, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994 introduced hundreds of millions
of federal dollars annually for rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters (Whittier 2016).
VAWA funds are often distributed through state public health departments for prevention
45

education, or through law enforcement agencies to maintain ongoing interorganizational
partnerships. Early typifications, which defined each type of violence as discrete, were cemented
in feminist organizations, and subsequently reaffirmed by government funding. Money largely
flowed to either rape crisis centers, which confront sexual violence, or to DV agencies and battered
women’s shelters, responsible for DV. Stalking, which emerged as a social problem later, is
generally treated only within domestic violence organizations, if at all. Although combined or dual
agencies, which respond to both SA and DV, are becoming more popular, organizational
separation of violence still largely continues to this day (Macy et al. 2009; O’Sullivan and Carlton
2001).
The Co-Occurrence of Violence
Although the anti-gender-based violence field treats each form of violence as discrete,
research shows that DV, SA, and stalking often co-occur (Peterson et al. 2019). Most sexual
assaults are committed by acquaintances (Truman 2011), and as many as one in three instances of
sexual violence are committed by intimate partners (Bagwell-Gray, Messing, and Baldwin-White
2015). Although activists have, for years, pushed back against popular conceptions of rapists as
strangers hiding in bushes (Brownmiller 1975; Griffin 1971), and have worked to criminalize
marital rape (Ross 2015), many people continue to believe that the typical case of rape is
perpetrated by a stranger, not by an intimate partner (Anderson 2007; Du Mont, Miller, and Myhr
2003). As a victim’s relationship with their perpetrator becomes closer, perceptions of the assault’s
severity decrease (Ben-David and Schneider 2005).
While forms of violence are usually treated discretely, sexual violence often emerges
within abusive relationships. Over half of men involved in a batterer intervention program, for
example, were found to have also sexually assaulted their partners (Bergen and Bukovec 2006).
46

Although marital rape can occur without additional forms of DV (Russell 1990), the two more
frequently co-occur (Hume 2018). Despite this, the typified case of DV involves only verbal abuse
and non-sexual physical abuse, like pushing, slapping, or hitting (Berns 2004; Kelly and
Westmarland 2016).
Stalking, too, co-occurs alongside both domestic and sexual violence. In the late 1980s and
early 1990s, several cases of celebrity stalking drew national attention. These high-profile cases
inspired activists to call for the criminalization of stalking. In a short amount of time, all fifty states
adopted anti-stalking laws, and many anti-gender-based violence agencies began providing
services specifically for victims of stalking. Early accounts of celebrity cases established stalking
as a crime committed by strangers, despite evidence that the majority of stalking cases are
perpetrated by former intimate partners, not strangers (Gerbrandij et al. 2018). As with domestic
and sexual violence, because the typical case of stalking is imagined to be at the hands of strangers,
people conceptualize intimate partner stalking as less severe than stranger stalking (Ford 2018;
Scott et al. 2015).
Recognizing that different forms of violence like stalking, sexual assault, and domestic
violence co-occur matters not only for shifting cultural understandings of the phenomena, but also
for advancing effective service provision. Research shows that DV victims who also experience
SA have more severe
5
physical and emotional health outcomes than victims only experiencing DV
(Campbell and Soeken 1999; Ross, Drouin, and Coupe 2019). An effective service provision
model considers how the co-occurrence of violence shapes the treatment required by victims
(Hume 2018). Victims of co-occurring DV and SA, for example, might require gynecological

5
I do not mean to imply here that experiencing only DV is “less bad” than experiencing DV and SA. Co-occurring
violence, however, does introduce the opportunity for additional types of harm, like physical traumas associated
with penetrative rape, not commonly found in non-sexual DV. I use the language of severity here to maintain
consistency with the literature and to signal victims’ differing needs.
47

attention not required by DV victims. Research also shows that batterers who commit SA in
addition to DV have higher recidivism rates than do those who do not, which should inform how
advocates safety-plan with victims (Stalans, Hacker, and Talbot 2010). Similarly, stalking
committed by an intimate partner calls for different safety-planning techniques than an incident of
stranger stalking since sexual, extreme physical violence, and murder, are more likely in cases
involving stalking by an intimate partner (Gerbrandij et al. 2018). I argue here that the typification
of SA, DV, and stalking as discrete forms of violence limits advocates’ capacity for effective
service provision because they are unfamiliar with the unique needs of people experiencing
multiple forms of violence.
Typification in Social Problems Theory
The emergence of SA, DV, and stalking as social problems perfectly aligns with the general
process of social problem construction identified by theorists. Social problems theory tracks how
empirical conditions, like HIV (Epstein 1996), child abuse (Pfohl 1977), or drunk driving
(Gusfield 1981), come to be seen as social problems (Best 2017; Kitsuse and Spector 1973; 1975).
This approach concerns itself with people’s subjective understandings of social phenomena,
arguing that no conditions are objectively problematic (Spector and Kitsuse 2001). Rather, “social
problems” are the result of social construction processes. The lifecycle of a social problem follows
several stages. First, some group of people, called claimsmakers, defines some condition as a social
problem. This requires typification, or the process of creating shared understandings of typical
cases of and responses to the social problem (Best 2017). If successful, claimsmaking leads to
policymaking, where various organizations, like the state and medical industry, come together to
solve the problem, as typified by claimsmakers. Finally, social problems workers, tasked with
48

addressing problems on the ground, use established typification schema to categorize conditions
and address those conditions identified as problems (Ibarra and Kitsuse 2003).
Drawing on ethnomethodology, social problems theorists are interested in how people
come together to attach meaning to some social condition (Best 2017; Kim and Berard 2009).
Claimsmakers make some aspect of the condition most salient, framing conditions in moral,
medical, or political ways. Only by creating shared definitions of social problems does action
become possible. Scholars apply this ethnomethodological approach to many different empirical
cases. In a study of competing frames about body weight in the U.S., for example, Kwan and
Graves shows how claimsmakers variously define fatness as a medical problem, a moral problem,
or a civil rights problem (2003). Studies of typification privilege cultural constructions, often
emanating from social movement actors, medical professionals, policymakers, or the media (Best
2017). I extend this approach by studying not only cultural constructions, like language used to
describe problems, but also organizational constructions. In addition to studying how people
rhetorically make claims about social problems, I explore how more structural features also
construct meaningful categories. This moves social problems theory beyond its
ethnomethodological foundations towards a theory that considers how typifications become
embedded within organizations over time.
In this paper, I use social problems theory to understand how SA, DV, and stalking are
typified as discrete forms of violence. This case illuminates the potential consequences of
typification. Rather than simply identifying a theoretical process by which some condition
becomes defined as a social problem, I show how the construction process can matter for people’s
lives. I identify both rhetorical and organizational conditions that typify DV, SA, and stalking as
49

discrete forms of violence, and then also argue that this process limits advocates’ ability to
successfully provide services to victims of co-occurring violence.
METHODS
I conducted a 26-month ethnography in a gender-based violence prevention organization
on the west coast of the United States called, pseudonymously, the Center for Healthy Futures
(CHF). CHF was an ideal site because, unlike many gender-based violence prevention
organizations (O’Sullivan and Carlton 2016), victims of DV, sexual violence, and stalking are all
served within the same organization. This allowed me to examine how each type of violence was
constructed as independent from the others. CHF, with its full-time staff of 55 and fluctuating
volunteer force of around 200, provided one-on-one and group counseling, legal support like
restraining orders and U visa applications
6
, crisis intervention, a 24-hour hotline, and preventative
educational presentations in community organizations and schools. I volunteered for CHF from
January 2017 through February 2019, providing crisis intervention services to domestic violence
victims in police stations, giving violence prevention presentations in schools and community
groups, and training new cohorts of CHF volunteers. I secured IRB approval prior to entering the
field and maintained transparency about my status as a researcher throughout my time with CHF,
alerting each new cohort of members to my role.
I completed CHF’s 72-hour intervention volunteer training program in the spring of 2017,
after which I began volunteering once a week for five hours as a domestic violence advocate. In
the fall of 2018, I completed CHF’s 65-hour prevention volunteer training program. I then began
giving violence prevention presentations to groups of middle and high school students at least
twice a month. I also assisted staff in training two additional groups of intervention volunteers and

6
The U visa is a legal pathway to citizenship for undocumented people who experience substantial physical or
mental harm as a result of a qualifying crime while living in the United States (USCIS 2018).
50

one group of prevention volunteers. Additionally, I attended monthly in-service meetings, during
which volunteers were provided with ongoing education, official volunteer appreciation events,
and unofficial volunteer and staff social outings. I took jottings on pen and paper while in the field,
which I later typed into extended fieldnotes shortly after each observation period. Since I did not
audio record conversations in the field, all quotes attributed to respondents below are jottings.
Because I always had pen and paper, however, quotes are close to verbatim. In total, I collected
over 700 hours of ethnographic data.
This paper draws primarily on data collected during trainings because all CHF members,
including volunteers and staff members, completed the same training sequence, making it an
important socializing experience. Through training, CHF members learned how the organization
recognizes and treats each form of violence. Because I did not want my role as a researcher to
influence a victim’s decision to take advantage of CHF’s resources, I do not include my time spent
interacting with victims as data. I do include, however, data on interactions with organization
partners, like law enforcement, educators, and medical professionals. Although my experiences
working with clients do not appear as data, they did deepen my understanding of the tensions CHF
members experience when treating violence.
Also included in my data are written documents disseminated throughout the organization.
Volunteers received many supplemental readings and worksheets during trainings. CHF also used
many forms to evaluate volunteers, and to track the movement of clients through the organization.
Analysis of these documents informed my understanding of how CHF categorizes different types
of violence. While ethnomethodologists rarely focus on these data, other ethnographic traditions,
like institutional ethnography, show their usefulness (Smith 2005). This approach allowed me to
understand how typifications became embedded within the organization’s physical materials.
51

Rather than entering the field with a set theoretical question, I engaged in an iterative
process of memoing and data collection (Charmaz 2014). While still in the field, I began coding
fieldnotes using both descriptive and process codes, then writing thematic memos during which I
identified emergent questions and contradictions (Saldaña 2015). For example, early in this
iterative process I noticed that a descriptive code, “Example of Violence,” rarely diverged from an
ideal type. From my reading of the empirical literature on gender-based violence, I understood
these ideal types to be misaligned with the reality of violence. This observation led me to consider
the implications of typification of violence for victims, a research question not identified prior to
my entry into the field.
RESULTS
In this section, I track how DV, SA, and stalking are typified in CHF both rhetorically and
organizationally. Since most social problems theorists work in an ethnomethodological tradition,
I begin with rhetorical typification, showing how people talked about each form of violence as
discrete. Rather than discussing the complex co-occurrence of different forms of violence, CHF
members largely discussed cases in which clients experienced one form of violence. This rhetorical
typification strategy established DV, SA, and stalking as independent from one another.
After establishing rhetorical typification by CHF members, I show how organizational
features also distinguish between each type of violence. Government grants required CHF to
provide its new volunteers with presentations specifically on DV, SA, and stalking. To clearly
meet these requirements, CHF trainings allocated time explicitly for each form of violence
independent from the others. Educational materials, too, like infographics and written accounts of
violence, presented each as discrete. Finally, government funding identified the type of violence
52

CHF was expected to respond to, creating organizational jurisdictions that assumed DV, SA, and
stalking never overlap.
Rhetorical Typification
When constructing some condition as a social problem, claimsmakers often draw on the
most extreme examples to illustrate their claims (Best 2017; Weiss forthcoming). In the case of
DV, for example, a claimsmaker might discuss the case of domestic terrorism, like physical
violence leading to an emergency room visit, rather than a more common case of situational partner
violence, like a push during a verbal altercation (Johnson 2008). These extreme typifications
inspire desire for action. In addition to presenting just extreme examples, though, I show that social
problems workers also present the clearest cases of violence, closest to the typification’s ideal
form. CHF members largely presented examples of violence that fit most cleanly into ideal types
of violence. Here, that means examples that illustrated only one type of violence rather than
common instances of co-occurrence. I show below how CHF members discussed each form of
violence in its ideal form in both formal presentations and roleplay activities.
Domestic violence
When presenting on DV, CHF staff and representatives of partner organizations often
chose clear examples that demonstrated what violence might look like in its ideal form. During a
training for intervention volunteers, Tara
7
, an emergency services coordinator, provided an
overview of protocol for volunteers working the DV Response Team. She reminded volunteers
that their role is to work collaboratively with law enforcement. Tara qualified this, though, by
discussing a law enforcement officer’s perpetration of DV.

7
All proper names are pseudonyms.
53

TARA: Abuse is twice as high among law enforcement than the
general public. They protect their own, so it’s really hard to hold
them accountable. One time an officer was beating his wife pretty
badly. He had broken multiple bones. She tried to report him, but
they refused to take a report. One day, she pointed a gun at him. The
officer called the police, and his wife had her gun license revoked.
The cop is still working for [the police department]. The survivor
did leave the relationship, though. CHF fought to try to get her gun
license reinstated.
The abuse Tara described above, experienced by a CHF client, was an extreme case of DV. Most
cases of DV do not end in broken bones. As past social problems theorists have argued, it served
as an effective typifying example in its severity. The most extreme examples often garner the most
attention. In addition to severity, however, this example also had clarity. The victim’s experience
was clearly an instance of DV, not stalking or sexual violence. Although these forms of violence
often co-occur, Tara chose to use an example of violence in which the batterer only used control
strategies defined as non-sexual DV.
CHF members’ typification of DV is further cemented during roleplays. Roleplays, as I
introduced earlier, provided volunteers with the opportunity to practice their counseling skills in a
low-pressure atmosphere. CHF staff members and veteran volunteers provided roleplays, using
prewritten scenarios to play the role of callers on the hotline. During a roleplay, I pretended to be
a female caller who had been in an abusive relationship for ten years.
VOLUNTEER: CHF hotline, how can I help you?
AUTHOR: I don’t know what to do.
54

VOLUNTEER: Okay, I’m here to talk to you. Do you want to tell
me a little bit about what’s going on?
AUTHOR: It’s gotten worse with my husband again. We fight a lot,
I guess. It was good for a while but now it feels like I’m walking on
eggshells. I don’t know what to do.
VOLUNTEER: I’m sorry to hear that. Are you in a safe place to talk
right now?
AUTHOR: I’m at home. He shouldn’t be home until later.
VOLUNTEER: That’s good. And when you say you fight [pauses]
does he ever hit you?
AUTHOR: Well, yes. He doesn’t leave bruises though.
We continued with the roleplay. The volunteer told me about reporting options, walking me
through the process of filing a police report and securing a restraining order. We also discussed
the possibility of accessing an immigration U visa for victims of crime. The DV incident, though,
remained typical in its focus on only a single type of violence. Presenting volunteers only with
single-type violence, rather than DV occurring alongside stalking or SA, foreclosed an opportunity
for volunteers to practice providing services for victims experiencing co-occurring violence.
Sexual assault
Like with DV, CHF members presented sexual violence largely in its purest form.
Examples used represented clear cases of sexual violence, not complicated by additional forms of
violence. By using only this type of example, CHF members interactionally established pure cases
as typical, rather than cases co-occurring with other forms of gender-based violence. While
55

training prevention volunteers, Violet, the training coordinator, used a high-profile national case
to educate volunteers.
VIOLET: Does anyone remember the Brock Turner case?
[Denise, a volunteer, summarizes the case. In 2015, a Stanford
student athlete sexually assaulted a 22-year-old outside of a house
party, digitally penetrating her. He tried to escape but was
apprehended by two bystanders. Denise summarizes the case. He
was later found guilty of SA and sentenced to six months in jail.]
VIOLET: [nodding along] This case became famous for things that
happened during the trial, there was a lot of victim blaming. It was
also famous for the victim impact statement that was shared. It also
got a lot of attention because Brock Turner was sentenced to six
months, and only served three. The law has changed since then so
that digital penetration can be prosecuted to the full extent of the
law. This is why CHF uses a broader definition of rape than the law,
though. We believe that digital penetration can be just as
traumatizing, and it’s not our place to tell a victim which kind of
assault is worse.
JESSICA: I’m just curious [pauses] junior high students…. What
example would you use? I’m assuming they aren’t familiar with the
Brock Turner case.
VIOLET: I use Brock Turner. A lot of them actually know Brock
Turner. And I use it as an opportunity to educate if they don’t.
56

During her presentation on SA, Violet used the case of Brock Turner to typify SA. In this incident,
a young man digitally penetrated a woman whom he did not know. This type of stranger assault is
statistically uncommon. In using it as an example of assault, however, Violet interactionally
established stranger assault as normal. Violet also encouraged prevention volunteers, who will be
teaching about SA to middle and high school students throughout the city, to use the Brock Turner
case to demonstrate SA, strengthening this entrenched typification.
During roleplays, too, CHF members typified SA as independent from domestic violence
and stalking. In the following roleplay, I was provided with the following scenario, pre-written by
Elisa, the training coordinator:
Survivor was sexually assaulted on a blind date in a parking lot
downtown. She shares that she wants to report, but is scared of
reporting to the police because she was “buzzed.” She is weighing
her option of reporting, but doesn’t know what to expect.R
Following this prompt, I led a volunteer trainee in a roleplay.
VOLUNTEER: CHF hotline, how can I help you?
AUTHOR: Um, I went on a date. I guess I had, umm, three drinks,
but I hadn’t had dinner. I’m kinda small, so I got kinda drunk.
Afterward…..um…. we walked to the parking lot and he was gonna
drive me home [pause, crying]. In the parking lot, he shoved me
against his car, and he put his hand down my pants and….. I can’t
say it.
VOLUNTEER: I’m so glad you called. It’s great that you called.
I’m sorry this happened to you. I just wanna say, it doesn’t matter if
57

you were drunk, it doesn’t mean anybody gets to do anything with
your body that you don’t give them permission to.
In this scripted roleplay, a volunteer and I practiced responding to a victim experiencing single-
type violence. The victim described sexual assault committed outside of an intimate relationship.
Because volunteers largely engaged with examples of single-type violence, both in presentations
and roleplays, I suggest that they may be unprepared to deal with co-occurring violence as it
emerges in the field—for example, sexual assault committed by an intimate partner.
Stalking
When presenting on stalking, CHF members more frequently discussed the ways in which
it co-occurs with domestic and sexual violence. Stalking emerged as a crime during the 1990s
when DV and SA advocacy and treatment were already institutionalized. Rather than creating new
agencies for treating just stalking, advocates addressed stalking alongside other forms of gender-
based violence while still defining it as a discrete type of violence. Even though CHF members
acknowledged that stalking occurs alongside DV and SA, though, they still emphasized behaviors
associated purely with stalking, largely ignoring how other forms of gender-based violence
complicate stalking. For example, while presenting to intervention volunteers, Dolly, the director
of disability services, shared the story of a stalking victim who, after three years of continued
stalking, finally moved to a different city to escape her abuser. Although the victim was in a dating
relationship with her abuser, Dolly deemphasized their romantic involvement.
DOLLY: I had a client whose stalker was gang involved. When he
wasn’t stalking her, he had some of his buddies stalk her. She was
so fearful she couldn’t even walk down the street. She came in, and
I told her, I want you to go to a movie. Take someone with you.
58

When you see someone who you think is stalking you, turn around
and stare at them. Let them know that you see them. The next day,
she emailed me and told me that she did it, she went to a movie with
her daughter – she thought she was being stalked, but when she
stared at them they walked away. The next week, she and her
daughter went to dinner before the movie. Eventually, her world
started opening up more. Did the stalking stop? No! It lasted for
about three years. But she finally got over the fear enough to move—
I got an email from her one day saying that she decided to just leave,
and her daughter decided to go with her.
While Dolly’s client was formerly romantically involved with the abuser, this relationship
was deemphasized. Instead, Dolly described only the behaviors typically associated with stalking,
like tracking the movements of the victim through public places. While the romantic relationship
may have been important in the actual victim’s safety-planning process, this complexity is left out
of the example. Instead, Dolly’s description of the incident made it almost seem as though the
victim and abuser were strangers to one another. By presenting stalking behaviors without
discussing the domestic and sexual violence that often accompanies them, CHF members
established stalking as independent from other forms of gender-based violence.
Roleplays, too, cemented this typification of stalking. During a roleplay with a volunteer,
I acted out an ideal case of stalking.
VOLUNTEER: CHF hotline, how can I help you?
AUTHOR: You have to help me, nobody believes me but I know
it’s him.
59

VOLUNTEER: Are you in a safe place to talk?
AUTHOR: Well I don’t know! He could come at any time, I never
know when he’s going to come.
VOLUNTEER: Okay, who is coming?
AUTHOR: This guy, my caretaker, he keeps leaving gifts. I haven’t
seen him do it, but I fucking know it’s him, I just know it.
VOLUNTEER: Okay, I believe you. I’m sorry that’s happening.
What would you like to see happen?
In this roleplay, I pretended to be a caller with a physical disability unable to leave her house,
whose former caretaker was leaving small gifts and notes for her on the front porch and
windowsills. This case was ideal in that it did not accompany other forms of domestic or sexual
violence. The stalker was known to the victim, but not romantically. While this is not a statistically
normal case of abuse, it does present stalking in its most pure form, unsullied by other forms of
violence. This typified stalking as independent from domestic and sexual violence.
Organizational Typifications
Because of its roots in ethnomethodology, much social problems scholarship focuses on
how people, through their interactions with one another, establish some set of conditions as a
typical case of a problem. In this section, I expand on this approach by showing how organizational
features also do this typification work. Because typifications have been institutionalized in law
and funding structures, CHF’s organizational features reproduced these typifications. Here I show
how training materials and organizational jurisdictions typified each form of violence as
independent from the others.
Training curriculum
60

The state in which CHF operated required rape crisis centers to adhere to a common
training curriculum. By aligning itself with the state, CHF earned certification and could legally
hold confidentiality with victims. The state curriculum required trainings specifically on SA, teen
SA, child SA, and others. Since CHF also provided services for DV victims, though, it offered DV
and stalking trainings on top of its required SA trainings. In practice, this meant that CHF required
its volunteers to complete separate trainings on DV, SA, and stalking.
In January of 2017, for example, I received trainings on SA medical exams, criminal-legal
procedures for SA cases, and SA trauma responses. Later, in February, I received separate trainings
on DV trauma responses, the DV legal process, and the impact of DV on families. Trainings for
intervention volunteers beginning the winter, spring, and summer of 2019, for which I served as a
coach, also followed the same format. Certification requirements require CHF to prioritize SA
trainings, leaving DV relegated to the second half of training. Coaches, who were veteran
volunteers assisting staff with trainings, noticed this demarcation. During a meeting between
coaches and staff prior to the start of a new training sequence, Katrina, a coach, identified
separation of SA and DV as an issue.
KATRINA: By the time we get to DV they’ve already been in
training for a month. We’re so busy with roleplays and getting
caught up that I feel like we’re not doing DV justice. We’re still
getting everyone caught up with SA, so realistically we’re trying to
do DV in the last week. [Pausing to think] I don’t know if there’s
another way to do it… we can’t do SA and DV at the same time,
they’d get confused.
61

CHF is constrained by certification requirements. To earn confidentiality privileges, it must
adhere to the state’s training curriculum for rape crisis centers. Because CHF also serves DV
victims, though, it must also provide trainings on DV. This means that CHF ended up providing
volunteers with presentations on each discrete type of violence, independent from the others.
Katrina above recognized this as an issue, arguing that, because CHF starts with SA, advocates
received less training on DV. Still, because funders require specific trainings, CHF is limited in its
capacity to alter the curriculum. During the same meeting prior to the start of training, Jade, a
volunteer coach, asked for additional time in the training for roleplays with coaches to overcome
the problem Katrina identified above. Elisa explained that, because of grant requirements, they
could not make room in the schedule.
JADE: If everyone is falling behind in the first few weeks, why
don’t we set aside a day for just roleplays in the middle of training.
So we take a Wednesday night and get people caught up. That way
they won’t get discouraged, and we won’t have a bunch of
roleplays to do at the end of training.
ELISA: I hear you, it’s a good idea. I can bring it to [the director of
emergency services]. The problem is, for the grant we can’t take a
whole day out of training halfway through….. they’ll see an empty
day and won’t understand it.
JADE: What if we schedule a shorter presentation, 45 minutes,
seriously 45 minutes, then spend the rest of the time on roleplays.
We could split it, a Wednesday and Saturday.
62

ELISA: Yeah, but we don’t have any [presentations] that are 45
minutes, that’s the problem. It’s the district attorney and all the
criminal legal presentations, and they’re all longer. And they need
all that time for the information. It has to be a certain length for the
grants.
Jade suggested taking a day halfway through training to get volunteers caught up on SA
material before moving on to DV. Elisa would have liked to accommodate this request but was
limited by grant requirements. CHF staff and volunteers worried that this organizational feature
limited volunteers’ capacity to respond to DV victims since they received a disproportionate
amount of training and roleplay time on SA. I add to this critique, suggesting that funding
requirements typified SA and DV as discrete forms of violence, a process that further disserviced
victims experiencing co-occurring violence.
Organizational Jurisdictions
In CHF’s city, multiple rape crisis centers competed for city contracts to staff DV Response
Teams (DVRT), which are partnerships between law enforcement officers and volunteer
advocates. Separate grants, awarded to individual rape crisis centers, ensured counselor advocates
were available to provide victims of SA with crisis counseling and accompaniments during police
interviews and medical examinations. These grants produced an environment in which service
provision for each type of violence was carefully separated and tracked. Since SA and DV grants
were separate, individual rape crisis centers were sometimes funded to serve DV victims but not
SA victims, and vice versa. During an orientation for new volunteers, for example, Elisa, the
intervention training coordinator, reminded volunteers of the requirements for those serving on a
DVRT.
63

ELISA: To be clear, if you decide to work DVRT, you’ll be assigned
to one station and you’ll be expected to complete your whole
volunteer commitment there.
VOLUNTEER: Which stations does CHF work out of?
ELISA: Well, it gets a little complicated. You’ll have a whole
training on CHF services later. Volunteers provide DVRT services
in four stations. We respond out for SA in more stations than that
though. But in some of our DVRT stations we don’t do SA, our sister
agencies do it there.
Here a volunteer, worried about their commute to the police station where they might be assigned,
asked where CHF provides services. Elisa explained that CHF provided both DV and SA services
in some stations, only DV in others, and only SA in some. A handout shared with volunteers later
clarified this separation of services. The document listed each police precinct in the city. Under
each name, CHF listed services provided. Some said, in red ink accentuated by an asterisk, “DV
ONLY,” or “SA ONLY,” followed by a referral to a separate agency for the services not provided
by CHF. Victims’ experiences of violence are messier than the clean categorization presented by
internal paperwork, though. One in three sexual assault victims also experience domestic violence,
for example. Since the reality of violence on the ground was misaligned with organizational
protocol, advocates’ responses to individual victims were inconsistent.
People in organizations oftentimes conduct work misaligned with their organizations’
stated policies. For example, if an SA victim also experiencing DV walked into a station where
CHF only officially provided DV services, the advocate may have chosen to provide SA services
64

anyway. During a volunteer shift at a DV only station, I briefly provided crisis intervention to a
sexual assault victim following a self-defense training for community members.
My law enforcement partners and I head into the community room
at our police station, where another officer is leading a group of 15-
or-so women in a self-defense training. The officer leading the
training asked us to briefly introduce CHF’s services to the group. I
describe CHF’s mission and services while one of my partners
translates into Spanish. The class then takes a break. Before I leave
the community room to head back to the DVRT office, a young
woman stops me and tells me she’s a sexual assault victim interested
in services. “I’m sorry you went through that,” I say, “and it’s great
you’re interested in services. What do you think might be helpful for
you?” “Anything,” she tells me.

Uncomfortable, knowing CHF does not provide SA services out of
my police station, I decide to send her information along to our main
office. “If you can wait for one second,” I say, “I’ll run and grab a
form so I can get your information. Then CHF will be in touch with
you to provide services.”

Later, back in the DVRT office, I confess to my law enforcement
partner that I don’t know if I’ve broken the rules. We’re only
supposed to offer services to DV victims. “Oh, whatever,” my
65

officer says, “Grace spent like an hour with a sexual assault victim
like two weeks ago, just talking.”
Clearly, CHF members did provide services to SA victims even when the organization was
not funded to do so. This suggests that, in practice, the organizational separation of victims did not
necessarily prevent service delivery in all cases. I felt hesitant about providing services to the
victim who approached me, however. Rather than offering to talk privately, as I would have done
with a DV victim, I decided to shift the responsibility to CHF staff as quickly as possible. I see
this as a disservice to the victim, as she signaled an interest in talking more about sexual violence
by approaching me, but it was not within the purview of the organization to provide the service.
Moreover, I felt uncomfortable providing SA services despite already having experience doing so
in other instances as a volunteer for over a year. Newer volunteers may have felt even less
comfortable providing SA services in a station where CHF is only contracted to provide DV
services. Since most volunteers were new, I question then, how common Grace’s (another veteran
volunteer) and my flexibility was. Strict organizational typification at least potentially limits the
types of incidents to which CHF members responded and created inconsistency between advocate
responses.
Acknowledgement of co-occurrence
Although CHF members largely discussed DV, SA, and stalking in their ideal forms, they
did sometimes acknowledge their co-occurrence. During roleplays, for example, scenarios
sometimes presented examples of SA occurring within DV relationships:
Survivor is undocumented and her husband sexually assaulted [her]
after years of emotional and financial abuse. She is fearful of
reporting because she is fearful law enforcement will deport her. She
66

has three kids with her husband and fears leaving them with him if
she is ever deported.
In this pre-written scenario, used by coaches to prepare new volunteers for their work with
victims, a victim experienced both SA and DV within the same relationship. This example clearly
acknowledged the possibility of the co-occurrence of violence. In another scenario, a male caller
described being raped by his boyfriend. Because the sexual assault here occurred within the context
of an intimate relationship, it also constituted a form of domestic violence, demonstrating the co-
occurrence of SA and DV.
These two examples, however, were the only two scenarios involving the co-occurrence of
DV and SA. To graduate from training, volunteers needed to complete roleplays covering 11
substantive topics, including SA, DV, stalking, and suicide. Six topics involved either DV or SA.
With 22 volunteers graduating from the winter 2019 training, CHF members used over 200
scenarios, over 100 of which covered DV or SA. Two examples of co-occurrence out of hundreds
of scenarios drastically underrepresents the rate of SA within intimate relationships. Even though
co-occurrence was acknowledged, then, cases presented in their ideal form vastly outnumbered
cases involving multiple forms of violence.
During presentations, too, CHF staff sometimes recognized co-occurrence. While
presenting on various events occurring during April, which is Sexual Assault Awareness Month,
Charlotte, the prevention volunteer coordinator, explained the organization’s approach to
prevention.
CHARLOTTE: The old way of prevention doesn’t really work.
Make sure you have a buddy! We know that over 75 percent of
67

assaults are by someone you already know, so it could be your
buddy. That’s why we try to do prevention earlier, before that.
Charlotte recognized that most perpetrators of sexual violence are known to the victim,
making many preventative techniques, like carrying pepper spray or walking with a “buddy,”
ineffective. By acknowledging that “over 75 percent” of assaults occur within preexisting
relationships, a statistic that includes SA occurring within intimate relationships, Charlotte created
a perfect opportunity to discuss the co-occurrence of SA and DV. Charlotte missed the opportunity
however, and, just a few minutes later, fell back on single-type violence while explaining in detail
the SA case that inspired Denim Day, a yearly event in which many rape crisis centers around the
world participate.
CHARLOTTE: Are you all familiar with this case? An 18-year-old
woman was taking her first driving test and her 40-something-year-
old instructor took her to a remote location and raped her. She
reported the rape and he was actually arrested and incarcerated,
which is great, that’s more than usually happens here, so nice job
Italy. But then he appealed and it went all the way to the Supreme
Court. The argument that they used was that her jeans were so tight
she must have helped him take them off, thereby consenting.
Although Charlotte acknowledged the co-occurrence of sexual violence with intimate
partner violence, she provided no examples of what this type of abuse looks like. Instead, she
discussed an Italian case from the 1990s of stranger rape, a statistically unlikely occurrence. As I
show above, CHF members largely used examples of only one type of violence at a time, rarely
engaging with messier cases of co-occurring violence. Even when they recognized the potential
68

for co-occurrence, as Charlotte did above, they did not provide demonstrative cases. This more
vivid description of single-type violence may make co-occurrence seem less likely to volunteers.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
In this paper, I explore the rhetorical strategies and organizational features maintaining
typifications of DV, SA, and stalking as discrete forms of violence despite knowledge of their
frequent co-occurrence. Through over two years of participant observation in a single anti-gender-
based violence organization, I show that advocates frequently draw on examples of violence in
their ideal forms. Rather than discussing cases in which victims experience multiple forms of
violence, advocates talked about victims’ experiences with only one form that clearly fits earlier
typifications. This rhetorical strategy aligns with past social problems literature which shows how
claimsmakers and social problems workers alike use relatively extreme examples of the problem
to advance their cause. Here, advocates’ use of extreme examples is not necessarily to inspire
sympathy from an already-sympathetic audience, but to maintain clear distinctions between each
type of violence.
Expanding on past social problems literature, I show that organizational conditions matter
in constructing social problems. Past theory, building on ethnomethodological traditions, shows
how people, through interaction, turn some social conditions into social problems. Attention is
paid to rhetorical strategies, communication patterns, and media framings. In this paper I find that
organizational features outside of individuals’ interactions also play a role in typification. CHF’s
grants required the organization to maintain clear distinctions between each type of violence in its
volunteer trainings. Funding structures also create organizational jurisdictions based on type of
violence, precluding the possibility of co-occurring violence. These organizational features, along
with the rhetorical strategies identified above, contribute to the long-term stickiness of
69

typifications. This paper builds on social problems theory by identifying organizational
typification as an important factor in the construction of social problems.
Because victims experiencing multiple types of violence require different interventions
than victims experiencing only one, the typification of DV, SA, and stalking as discrete limits
advocates’ capacity for effective service provision. Victims of SA within the context of a DV
relationship, for example, may require medical attention not required by victims only of non-sexual
DV. The rhetorical and organizational typifications I describe in this paper potentially limit
advocates’ understanding of how to effectively respond to co-occurring violence because they are
only familiar with violence as it emerges in its ideal form. To overcome rhetorical typification,
CHF staff might rely more heavily on examples of co-occurring violence. Since existing funding
structures produce the organizational separation of SA, DV, and stalking, more structural changes
are necessary to overcome the problematic typification of each form of violence as discrete.

70

Chapter 3:
How Organizational Architecture Stymies Criminal Justice Reform: Evidence from an Anti-
Gender-Based Violence Organization
ABSTRACT
The contemporary penal regime, which was once a popular political project, has come under
increased scrutiny in recent years. In demanding reform, critics point to mass incarceration’s
exorbitant financial and social costs. Despite this pushback, however, the penal regime remains
stubbornly entrenched. Scholars draw theoretically on either material or symbolic traditions to
understand the emergence and persistence of the carceral state, suggesting that punishment
remains a normal response to crime because it advances individuals’ material or political
interests. This paper introduces a complementary explanation for persistence, arguing that
organizational architecture contributes to the carceral state’s intractability even when street-level
workers in the criminal justice field want reform. Drawing on nearly three years of participant
observation in an anti-gender-based violence organization, this paper shows how specific
organizational features –physical buildings and personnel– make criminal justice reform
challenging even for workers politically sympathetic to alternatives to punishment. Results
empirically advance research on the anti-gender-based violence movement by identifying
barriers to the development of more effective intervention and prevention strategies. For
sociological and criminological literatures on punishment, this paper shows how organizational
architecture, not only material interests and symbolic claims, produces carceral entrenchment.

71

Mass incarceration and supervision, produced by criminal justice reforms once broadly popular
in the United States, are coming under increased scrutiny (Dagan and Teles, 2014). Over half of
U.S. citizens believe too many people are currently incarcerated (Morning Consult 2016).
Policymakers at all levels of government are working on bipartisan legislation to get more people
out of jails and prisons (Petersilla and Cullen, 2015). Despite this shift in public attitudes, U.S.
incarceration rates remain higher than any other country in the developed world (Beckett, Reosti
and Knaphus, 2016). Reformative efforts extend only to youth and nonviolent offenders, leaving
untouched large swaths of incarcerated populations (Greene and Mauer, 2010; Subramanian,
Moreno, and Broomhead, 2014), and attempts to close prisons oftentimes do little to lower the
actual number of incarcerated individuals (Webster and Doob, 2014). Why, despite widespread
frustration with mass incarceration, does the contemporary penal regime remain so intractable?
Scholars generally propose two types of theoretical explanations for the intransigence of
the penal state. Materialist theories claim that mass incarceration persists because it serves
capital’s interests. As the neoliberal economy shifts its production of tangible goods to the
developing world, a poor sub-proletariat is created in the United States. Coinciding with the
dismantling of the welfare state, the carceral state steps in to manage an un-or-underemployed,
disenchanted sub-proletariat (Wacquant, 2009). Scholars propose many addendums to this
general story while retaining the broad-strokes relationship between the state’s material interest
and the growth in the penal regime.
In a Durkheimian tradition, symbolic theories suggest that mass incarceration is useful
both in its power to correct the social deviance of offenders, but also to encourage non-offenders
to stay in line (Garland, 2012). Some scholars combine an understanding of the symbolic power
72

of punishment with a materialist critique, arguing that punishment of non-working sub-
proletariat encourages the precariously employed to stay committed to their undervalued work.
Both materialist and symbolic arguments emphasize the role individuals play in maintaining the
carceral state. Politicians use punitive arguments to secure votes, correctional officers protest
prison closures, and police unions refuse to implement alternatives to incarceration. Missing
from these explanations is attention to how organizational architecture – the buildings, staff, and
funding structures built to support the penal regime – also shape the contemporary penal regime
independent of individuals’ actions on the ground. This paper explores the role played by these
organizational features in reproducing the carceral state.
Empirically, this paper takes as its case of the anti-gender-based violence movement.
This women’s liberation movement gained traction in the 1970s, a period of carceral expansion.
Early feminists contributed to this penal momentum, calling for increased policing and harsher
sentences for abusers. To this day, anti-gender-based violence advocates work alongside courts,
prosecutors, and police officers, making them integral components of a fragmented criminal
justice field. The author spent nearly three years collecting ethnographic data from a single anti-
gender-based violence organization pseudonymously referred to as the Center for Healthy
Futures. These data show that feminist advocates challenge the carceral state on symbolic and
material grounds. Still, their interactions with victims and perpetrators of violence sustain the
contemporary penal regime. I show how organizational architecture –the tangible features of
organizations, the stuff members can touch – produces this paradox.
Findings first advance empirical literature on gender-based violence by showing why
advocates sustain the carceral state. Whereas past scholars point to advocates’ support for
carceral logics –a form of carceral feminism – I find here the advocates sustain the carceral
73

state despite the political rejection of it. Specifically, I point the two features of the
organization’s architecture – the physical building and personnel – that can explain advocates’
paradoxical participation in the penal regime. Drawing back from this more empirical argument,
this paper also contributes theoretically to literature on the contemporary carceral state. I argue
that mundane organizational architecture, not only material and symbolic political arguments,
sustain the penal regime. For scholars and activists interested in dismantling the penal regime,
my findings suggest that attention to material and symbolic structures is insufficient without also
addressing these structures’ organizational progeny which can resist shifting symbolic and
material tides.
THE RISE OF THE CONTEMPORARY PENAL REGIME
Violence reached record levels in the United States in the 1970s, particularly in large
cities (National Research Council, 2014). Historical scholarship suggests violence could be
explained by the structure of drug markets at the time, which were impersonal, and high levels of
social and economic unrest. While the state could have responded in multiple ways to this
perceived crisis, the advent of tough-on-crime political rhetoric with liberal America’s
expectation of physical safety (Murakawa, 2014) produced a new penal regime. While
criminologists predicted the slow decline of the prison in the early 1970s (Wacquant, 2009), over
the following four decades rates of incarceration quadrupled (National Research Council, 2014).
Scholars interested in the “how” of prison expansion point often to the War on Drugs in
the 1970s and 1980s (Raphael and Stoll, 2013; Western, 2006). Purportedly concerned about the
inflow of illegal narcotics, particularly crack-cocaine because of its relationship with violent
crime, policymakers crafted drug laws, particularly at the federal level, to more harshly penalize
possession. Associated policies, like California’s three-strikes policy and new mandatory
74

minimums, meant people were serving longer sentences than ever before (National Research
Council 2014). Less-studied are shifts in prosecutorial discretion (Lynch, 2016; Pfaff, 2017).
While mandatory minimums reduced judges’ discretion, prosecutors became more powerful in
deciding who to charge, what to charge them with, and when to take pleas. Shifting prosecutorial
practices produced a rapid increase in the number of incarcerated individuals.
As I introduced above, sociologists and criminologists generally adhere to one of two
theoretical paradigms for explaining the advent of the new penal regime. Materialist arguments
suggest that state punishment is a tool for maintaining a social order conducive to capital. The
prison produces a docile workforce both through its incapacitation of excess labor and threat to
precarious workers (Schumpter, 1942). Wacquant, for example, tracks how the advent of mass
incarceration coincides with the decay of an industrial economy in the United States (2009). As
working-class jobs disappear, a sub-proletariat, jobless and without education, is left behind. The
state turns to prisons to control this new population and to negatively incentivize participation in
service employment at below-poverty-level wages. In a similarly structural argument, Alexander
argues that new penal regimes are intentionally racialized, used to control a Black and brown
underclass managed in earlier decades by voter disenfranchisement, Jim Crow laws, and earlier,
legal slavery (2012).
A second strain of theoretical development, not entirely disconnected from materialist
arguments, is a symbolic explanation for prison expansion. Building on Durkheim’s observation
that the punishment of individuals creates moral order for society more broadly, these scholars
are interested in what punitive rituals tell us about society’s values (Garland, 2012). Penal
practices create social demarcations in society, sending messages about which demographic
compositions are ideal (Franko and Bosworth, 2013). Penal rhetoric, employed by politicians and
75

the media, often has less to do with the empirical reality of crime and more to do with harnessing
racial fears and liberal expectations of bodily autonomy to garner votes and public support
(Feeley and Kamin, 1996; Murakawa, 2014; Sutton, 2013).
CONSEQUENCES OF MASS INCARCERATION
Regardless of the theoretical orientation used to explain the new penal regime’s
emergence, its consequences are indisputable. A large proportion of sociological and
criminological literature on the criminal justice system focuses less on its scale and more on its
effects on individuals. Scholars show that, while incarcerated, people experience human rights
and constitutional abuses via their lack of access to medical care and exposure to endemic
violence and overcrowding (Schoenfeld, 2010). Upon release, many former convicts experience
“social death,” denied access education, housing, and employment (Pager, 2003; Thacher, 2008;
Western and Sirois, 2019). People with criminal records are often relegated to a state of
perpetual poverty, unable to secure support that may enable their escape. Because of the
constrained choices produced by this social death, and the constant surveillance wrought by
bloated probation and parole systems, recidivism rates are very high (Tonry, 2016). Strain and
limited access to medical care produce worse physical and emotional health outcomes for
justice-involved individuals (Schnittker and John, 2007; Schnittker, Massoglia and Uggen,
2012).
What was once a popular political project is now coming under increased scrutiny.
Between the 1970s and 1990s, Democrats and Republicans alike voiced strong support for the
punitive turn in criminal justice (Dagan and Teles, 2014). By 2007, however, rates of prison
expansion had slowed, and public support for tough sentencing policies, particularly those
associated with the War on Drugs, began waning (Raphael and Stoll, 2013). Just as explanations
76

for the emergence of the new penal regime follow two theoretical trajectories, explanations for
its decline, too, draw on materialist and symbolic frameworks. Some critics point to the system’s
cost. State governments pay between $14,000 and $60,000 to incarcerate a single person per year
(National Research Council, 2014). Annual state and federal public safety spending amount to
around $90 billion. These expenditures produce very little social reward – many criminal justice
interventions show limited capacity for crime reduction (Raphael and Stoll, 2009; Tonry, 2016).
Other critics point to the social costs of incarceration, decrying the system’s widening of racial
and class stratification and its incompatibility with many U.S. values (Schoenfeld, 2010;
Webster, Sprott and Doob, 2019).
Despite these mounting critiques, punishment remains ubiquitous. Sentencing reforms are
often limited to the most politically palatable offenders, like youth offenders and people
incarcerated for non-violent offenses (Greene and Mauer, 2010; Subramanian and Moreno, 2014;
Webster and Doob, 2014). Scholars in the materialist and symbolic traditions explain the
entrenchment of the criminal justice system by pointing to the motivations of individuals
committed to its survival. Private prisons and street-level workers employed in detention
facilities, for example, fight against criminal justice reform to preserve their material interests
(Gottshalk, 2015; Jacobson, 2005; Page, 2011). More symbolic arguments show how punitive
rhetoric remains politically useful, particularly when redirected away from drug-related
enforcement and towards newer criminal justice issues like immigration (Fink and Brady, 2019;
Simmons, 2019).
These arguments share a focus on how individuals’ actions reproduce the criminal justice
system. In this paper, I show that the current penal regime remains strong sometimes in spite
of individuals’ symbolic and material interest in its reform. Specifically, I show how
77

organizational architecture – physical buildings, staffing patterns, and funding structures – make
reform difficult even when people on the ground want it.
GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE AND THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
While scholars speak of the “the carceral state,” recent interventions in the literature
suggest that a single, hegemonic state does not exist (Garland, 2013). Rather, the penal regime is
“fractured.” Detention centers are regulated by multiple levels of government and run by both
state and private interests. Civic organizations partner with the state to govern, punish, and
control (Haney, 2010; Herring, 2019). Non-penal state actors, like welfare and social service
providers, work together with penal officers to regulate populations (Beckett and Murakawa,
2012; Rubin and Phelps, 2017). One domain in which state-civic partnerships in punishment are
especially visible is the anti-gender-based violence movement.
The women’s movement emerged alongside other cultural movements, like the Civil
Rights and gay rights movements, in the politically turbulent 1960s (Echols, 1989). Rape and
domestic violence became clear examples of women’s social marginality for early activists
(Amir, 1971; Brownmiller, 1975; Harvey, 1985). Organizing around gender-based violence was
first definitional. Activists worked to define rape and domestic violence as widespread social
problems, where before they were understood largely as shameful, private affairs (Berk and
Loseke, 1980; Bumiller, 2010; Emerson, 1979; Parnas, 1972; Roy, 1977). Quickly, however,
activists turned their sights to the treatment of victims by major social institutions. Activists
noted that victims oftentimes experience a “second rape” -- an incident of victim-blaming -- at
the hands of law enforcement and medical professionals (Martin, 2005). Activists also pushed
against formal laws and prosecutorial strategies, arguing against tough evidentiary standards that
effectively prevented the conviction of sexual offenders. Reformers successfully expanded the
78

criminal justice system’s capacity to regulate sexual and domestic behaviors. Activist
intervention criminalized sexual violence within marriages and increased rates of arrest and
prosecution of domestic and sexual violence (Xie and Lynch, 2016).
Early feminist involvement in the criminal justice system was largely antagonistic and
external (Schmitt and Martin, 1999). Activists protested against law enforcement officers
accused of wife abuse, prosecutors who rarely filed charges against domestic and sexual
offenders, and judges who blamed victims for their abuse. Early in the movement, however,
activists were drawn into the criminal justice system. As early as the 1980s, police departments
began involving volunteer and professional victim advocates in the criminal justice process
(Garner and Maxwell, 2008). Through community coordinated response teams, rape crisis center
employees began working alongside law enforcement officers and medical professionals to
improve victims’ experience reporting crimes.
Today, rape crisis centers and domestic violence organizations still partner actively with
the criminal justice system. Nonprofit employees assist victims in filing restraining orders and
police reports and accompany victims during forensic medical examinations, law enforcement
interviews, and court appearances. The full embeddedness of anti-gender-based violence
advocates in the criminal-legal process makes them active participants in a fractured criminal
justice field. Despite advocates’ partnership with law enforcement, however, feminist critiques of
law enforcement remain common (Bumiller, 2009; Richie, 2012). Some advocates and scholars
worry that partnership with law enforcement deemphasizes the political project of women’s
liberation (Martin, 1990; Messner, Greenberg and Peretz, 2015). Others join critiques of the
criminal justice system more generally, pointing to its disproportionate targeting of people of
color and marginalization of needs of victims who are not “ideal” – non-white, formerly justice-
79

involved, or queer, for example (Bumiller, 2010). These critiques lead some feminist advocates
to imagine responses to gender-based violence outside of the criminal justice system.
COMPLEX VICTIMS OF GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE
In this paper, I focus on anti-gender-based violence advocates’ negotiation of a particular
criminal justice issue – the treatment of “complex victims.” Like with all social problems,
activists working to construct gender-based violence as a public issue draw on typifications of
the problem (Best, 1995). In social problems theory, typifications are ideal instances of the
problem. Although they might diverge substantively from the average case on the ground,
typifications are useful for crafting policy and garnering public support. In the gender-based
violence context, scholars have shown that typified understandings of rape and domestic
violence rest on “ideal victim” narratives.
“Ideal victims” are those who are free of all responsibility, entirely innocent in their
victimization. They exist in contrast to the “wicked perpetrator,” who is a monster entirely
responsible for violence (Christie, 1976). In cases of domestic violence, ideal victims are those
who frame themselves as “survivors” (Sweet, 2019). They see themselves as capable of healing
beyond the violence they experienced through a medicalized process of disclosure and therapy.
Ideal domestic violence victims are also blameless, never verbally or physically assaulting their
abusers, and leaving the relationship as soon as it turns abusive (Gracia, 2014; Meyer, 2016).
Rape victims must be similarly blameless. Ideally, they are women, young, white, and sober
(Hockett, Saucier and Badke, 2016; Richie, 2012). Constructions of ideal victims limit access to
services and legal recourse for victims who do not fit the ideal type (Rich, 2009). Because
constructions of ideal victims are gendered, classed, and raced, poor victims and victims of color
experience gaps in services most acutely (Richie, 2012).
80

Although the literature richly describes how ideal victim narratives fail to capture reality,
less attention is paid to complex victims, or those who are both victims and perpetrators. In the
domestic violence context, scholars do document the experience of victims who engage in
“violent resistance,” defined as violence done only in self-defense or in reaction to a more
dominant abuser’s violence (Johnson, 2008; Randall, 2004). While this is violence done by a
victim, contestation emerges over labeling victims also as perpetrators because their violence
occurs within a relationship marked by more patterned unidirectional abuse.
Yet, domestic violence advocates have long recognized domestic violence as a learned
behavior (Bevan and Higgins, 2002; Gelles, 1972). While activists and scholars alike are careful
not to make predictive claims about abused children’s proclivity towards later violence, research
does demonstrate a connection. Children, particularly male children, who witness domestic
violence as children are more likely to commit domestic violence later in life (Roberts et al,
2010). Direct child victims of physical and emotional abuse, too, are more likely to commit
domestic violence later in life (Kelly et al, 2005). These data demonstrate the porosity of victim
and perpetrator labels. Many perpetrators of abuse are themselves victims of similar violence.
Like domestic violence, rape, too, is learned. Early activists argued that boys are trained,
through socialization processes, to view women as objects to be owned and to value sexual
activity as emblematic of their social status (Brownmiller, 1975). These cultural beliefs come
together to create a society in which sexual violence is both permitted and, in some contexts,
encouraged (Lanier, 2001; Mouilso and Calhoun, 2013). Some scholars and activists argue that
these socialization processes are themselves a form of violence because they inhibit men’s
capacity for forming healthy relationships (Katz, 2018; Messner, 2016). More clearly, however,
there are connections between men’s proclivity towards perpetrating sexual violence and having
81

experienced it themselves. Victims of childhood sexual violence are more likely to commit
sexual violence later in life (Glasser et al, 2001; White and Smith, 2004). Child victims of non-
sexual emotional and physical abuse, too, are more likely to commit sexual violence (White and
Smith, 2004; Zurbriggen, Gobin and Freyd, 2010) These data demonstrate that many sexual
violence perpetrators are themselves victims of sexual violence.
Complex victims pose a challenge for the contemporary penal regime which assumes
clearly-identifiable perpetrators and victims. This paper explores how anti-gender-based violence
advocates conceptualize complex victims’ place in the criminal justice system. I find that
advocates challenge the criminal justice system’s legitimacy both because of its inability to heal
complex victims’ “victimhood” and its questionable moral position in punishing someone who
has experienced harm. Despite these challenges to the criminal justice system’s authority,
however, punishment remains the normal response to complex victims. I show the role
organizational architecture plays in maintaining this entrenchment.
DATA AND METHODS
I selected as my fieldsite the Center for Healthy Futures (CHF), a nonprofit anti-gender-
based violence organization located in a major metropolitan city on the U.S. Pacific coast. With a
staff of 65 full-time employees and over 200 volunteers, CHF provides crisis intervention and
prevention services to victims of domestic and sexual violence. Like many similar organizations,
intervention services include a crisis hotline, medical and court accompaniments, counseling, and
legal support. Prevention services include presentations in schools, workplaces, and community
groups on topics ranging from consent, to healthy relationships, to workplace sexual harassment.
The organization has a yearly budget of about $4 million, which is large compared to some sister
organizations, but commensurate with the organization’s high service load.
82

I conducted participant observation in CHF between January 2017 and September 2019.
Over these 32 months, I went through training to become both an intervention and prevention
volunteer. I volunteered once a week providing services to victims of domestic violence, and also
provided presentations in schools in community groups. After volunteering for about two years, I
also began serving as a volunteer coach, training new intervention and prevention trainees.
Additionally, I attended monthly in-service meetings, formal and informal social events, and
internal staff meetings. In total, I collected over 800 hours of ethnographic data.
Following IRB protocol, all organization members were aware of my status as a
researcher. I briefed all new members on the project and gained the necessary consent. While in
the field, I used either a notebook or my cell phone to write brief jottings. Shortly after exiting
the field, I expanded jottings into typed fieldnotes. Because I did not audio record in the field, all
excerpts presented below are jottings. Since I always had access to either a notebook or my
phone, though, jottings accurately reflect members’ original speech, tone, and comportment.
I analyzed the data following a modified grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2014).
I subjected early data to line-by-line coding, paying special attention to recurring processes
(Saldaña, 2015). I then wrote analytic memos, making connections between initial codes and
identifying emergent questions to ask while still in the field. An initial code that became
important for this paper, for example, was “Perpetrator-Victim.” This descriptive code captured
members’ discussions of any people who were both perpetrators and victims of gender-based
violence.
CHALLENGING THE CARCERAL STATE
CHF members often explicitly reject punitive models of justice. When presenting their
organization’s ideology, CHF members center alternative approaches that recognize all people’s
83

humanity and potential for growth. In the following excerpt, Sophie, the director of prevention
services, discusses her rejection of punitive models of justice while training new volunteers.
SOPHIE: You might think we’re an organization that’s like,
LOCK THEM UP [Sophie shouts with her fist raised], but we’re
actually not really like that. We think there are alternatives to
incarceration for domestic violence and sexual violence.
Sophie here summarizes well the organization’s orientation towards the criminal justice
system. Although CHF advocates work alongside the police, they do not see criminal justice
interventions as necessarily ideal. Field members consistently express their distaste towards the
criminal justice system. Members often challenge the legitimacy of the criminal justice system
by pointing to perpetrators’ own experiences with violence. In advocates’ view, incarceration is
an inappropriate way to respond to people who are themselves victims. In the following excerpt,
for example, Tatiana, a therapist who provides court-mandated courses for men charged with
domestic violence, explains her view on the effectiveness of the criminal justice system.
TATIANA: Being raised male is abusive. Boys are handicapped in
their ability to have relationships. They’re not taught healthy ways
to have and process emotion. The feminist movement made a
mistake by bifurcating male and female. Feminists wanted men to
go over there and deal with their shit. This was a mistake! It’s all
of our shit—we’re all connected. Male privilege does not benefit
most men. White middle-class men, of course, have more access to
political and economic stuff. But poor men, men of color don’t feel
84

privileged. And that political, economic privilege is not
everything!
[Tatiana continues, barely pausing for breath].
TATIANA: Hurting people hurt people. DV and IPV are not just
the result of patriarchy. To think it’s just patriarchy is grossly
simplistic. I want to teach men how to connect with people in
healthy ways. I think the way the criminal justice system, and
many advocates, treat men is shaming and abusive. Don’t fight
abuse with more abuse. Instead, teach people why their actions
were wrong. Target the abuse.
To Tatiana, incarceration is a form of abuse. Since perpetrators of violence have
themselves experienced harm, the criminal justice system’s response to offenders is, in Tatiana’s
view, illegitimate. In the following excerpt, Terrence, a CHF staff member, while presenting
with Cadence, a community activist on male sexual violence, uses the case of R. Kelly to
highlight perpetrators’ experiences as victims.
TERRENCE: We’ve all heard the expression “hurt people hurt
people.” R. Kelly was abused until he was the age of 14. It’s not a
coincidence that most of the girls he preyed on were around the
same age he was when the abuse stopped.
CADENCE: [nodding as Terrence speaks, before chiming in] I
believe there are blurred lines of consent. I believe -- I don’t know
what the numbers are--but a lot of the men I know, their first
sexual experiences were before 17. They were 7, 9, with an older
85

sister, a 22-year-old babysitter. So, if your first sexual encounter is
like that, consent is going to be very confusing for you. If nobody
asked for your consent, then that’s just the way it is, so of course
you’re not going to ask for someone else’s.
TERRENCE: We’re working with more than, boys don’t
understand consent. We’re also working with, boys are victims too.
Terrence and Cadence here share their belief that most perpetrators of violence are
themselves victims. My purpose here is not the assess the empirical veracity of their claim that
most men are sexually assaulted as children. Rather, I use this excerpt, and Tatiana’s quote
above, to demonstrate how CHF members use the experiences of complex victims – people who
both perpetrate and experience violence – to delegitimize the criminal justice system.
In addition to critiquing the criminal justice system, CHF members also propose alternative
strategies for working with complex victims. Hope, the director of clinical services, in the
following excerpt demonstrates CHF’s commitment to serving every victim of violence.
HOPE: No matter who walks through the door, counselors should
be providing positive care for that person and work with them,
regardless of what the person has done. Even a child abuser
deserves care. Everyone is a good person. They just do bad things.
Hope expresses her belief that complex victims deserve services independent of the
criminal justice system. This is a commitment shared by most CHF members, who believe all
victims of violence, regardless of their complex histories, deserve care. In practice, however,
CHF members are unable to implement their ideal non-punitive practices. The remainder of this
86

article explains the barriers preventing CHF members from implementing their alternatives to
criminal justice responses.
The above excerpts demonstrate symbolic support, at the organizational level, for non-
carceral approaches to justice. Staff and volunteers alike, particularly those most embedded in
the organization, see incarceration as paradoxical to the violence-prevention goals of the
organization. CHF members often point to complex victims to justify their support for
alternatives to incarceration. CHF does experience some material incentives to participate in the
criminal justice system – it receives funding from local law enforcement, and from the federal
Violence Against Women Act, to partner with the police. Importantly, however, most of its
funding does not stipulate which victims the organization can provide its non-carceral services
to. Additionally, some of its funding, particularly through local public health agencies, is meant
to support the organization’s work with complex clients. Given these symbolic and material
enablers of non-carceral responses to violence, CHF’s minimal engagement with complex
victims remains paradoxical.
ORGANIZATIONAL BARRIERS TO JUSTICE ALTERNATIVES
Above, I show that CHF members are skeptical of the carceral state, arguing that
punishment does not work because many offenders are also victims. Additionally, material
conditions – namely a lack of stipulations on service-provision dollars -- make possible the
treatment of complex victims. Despite this symbolic and material support for the treatment of
complex victims, however, I find that CHF does little to implement alternatives to the carceral
state for this population. In this section, I show how CHF’s organizational architecture – its
physical building and staffing patterns– produce the entrenchment of the carceral state,
preventing the development of justice alternatives.
87

Where Do We Provide Services for Complex Victims?
The main alternative to the carceral state proposed by CHF members, as demonstrated by
Hope above, is the provision of therapeutic services to complex victims.[1] For CHF to provide
services for this population, they would first need a physical space in which to meet with
complex victims. This poses a problem for many CHF members who see complex victims,
because of their perpetration of violence, as unwelcome in CHF’s offices near its more “ideal”
victims.
CHF has two offices, both of which serve victims of violence. The front doors to both
remain locked, requiring visitors to be buzzed in. This is meant to protect victims from abusers
who may show up to prevent them from receiving services or escaping abusive relationships.
During a new volunteer orientation, Elisa, the training coordinator, gives a tour of the building.
ELISA: You might’ve noticed when you came in that the door is
locked. If you’re ever late or the door is locked, just ring the
doorbell and we’ll let you in. We keep it locked 24/7 to keep our
survivors safe. Abusers unfortunately sometimes do show up,
sometimes they’re tracking survivors’ location, so we wanna make
sure we control who comes into the building.
In describing the organization’s safety protocol, Elisa relies on a dichotomous
understanding of victims and abusers. Victims are allowed inside the building, while perpetrators
must stay outside. This construction does not allow for complex victims who are both
perpetrators and victims. By spatially separating victims and perpetrators, too, CHF precludes
the possibility of bringing them into the same space to engage in an alternative justice process.
For the organization to fully engage with complex victims, CHF members would have to
88

reimagine who belongs inside of the building. For victims of violence not interested in engaging
in a restorative process, this might mean the maintenance of two separate offices, one capable of
engaging with complex victims, and one for “ideal” victims more interested in retributive models
of justice.
Some CHF clients do themselves express a desire to engage in non-carceral processes
with their abusers. For example, during a casual conversation at CHF’s office, Nona, a
prevention volunteer, tells me about an interaction she had with a victim of violence following a
community presentation.
NONA: After the presentation, this woman came up to me and was
telling me that she’s scared of her boyfriend, that he hits her. He
was just sitting behind her while she was talking to me, just
looking down. I was like, um. She was like, “what should I do? I
think he has psychological problems. How can he talk to someone?
He needs help with his psychological problems.” I didn’t know
what to say. I just said, “unfortunately, our organization only
provides services to victims. The only way for abusers to get help
is if the police get involved, through the courts.”
The victim Nona describes wants to engage in an alternative process with her abuser. She
wants her abuser to get the help he needs to learn how to engage in healthier relationship
patterns. Because the organization only serves “ideal” victims, however, not more complex
victims, Nona is not able to provide the victim with the resources she wanted. Lacking a physical
space in which to provide services for the abuser, Nona is able only to recommend the victim
report her victimization to the police, through which a judge might order her abuser to seek
89

counseling. This anecdote shows that both CHF members and their clients want alternative
justice interventions, but are constrained by their organization’s architecture
Who Provides Services for Complex Victims?
When hiring new employees, staff across sectors tend to select candidates who are
demographically similar to themselves (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001). Most
research on this pattern focuses on its capacity for reproducing race and gender inequality in
workplaces (Kleinbaum, Stuart, and Tushman 2013; Zeng and Xi 2008). Many nonprofit
organizations similarly advantage white women and men, particularly within executive-level or
managerial positions. Some organizations, either because of their political orientations,
grassroots histories, or populations serve, hire primarily people holding marginalized racial,
class, and gender identities (Greenberg and Mollick 2017), a practice that may be particularly
prominent in direct service nonprofits. At CHF, most direct service providers are Latina women,
which mirrors the demographic profile of most of CHF’s clients. In hiring, because of
organizations’ tendencies towards homophily, current CHF members oftentimes select new hires
demographically similar to them.
To demonstrate how this homophily operates within CHF, consider the following excerpt
drawn from a conversation I had over drinks with Monica, the intervention training coordinator,
after an event at CHF’s main office.
AUTHOR: [Knowing a new cohort of volunteers had recently
graduated] How are the new volunteers doing?
MONICA: They’re super good, actually. [CHF] already hired
someone.
AUTHOR: Oh, seriously? That was fast. Who?
90

MONICA: Bella. Not who I would’ve chosen, but they didn’t ask
me [Monica shrugs].
AUTHOR: Uh oh. Why not?
MONICA: I don’t think she was ready. Let her volunteer for a
while first. I even wanted to give her a few more weeks to
graduate, do some extra roleplays. But, I think Marta saw herself in
her, so… [Monica trails off]. She just left her abuser two years
ago!
In the above excerpt, Monica describes how Marta, a manager at CHF who is Latina and
a survivor of domestic violence, chose to hire on Bella, another Latina woman with a recent
experience with domestic violence. Monica, who both trains and manages volunteers, did not
think Bella was prepared for the role.
Monica’s excerpt demonstrates how hiring practices reproduce a similar type of employee within
CHF. Given research showing that victims of violence both prefer and are better served by
people who are demographically similar to them (Cabral and Smith 2011; Sumter 2006), CHF’s
hiring decisions here make sense. In addition to sharing language with many of CHF’s clients
who only speak Spanish, Bella may be able to build rapport in ways a white staff member could
not. Through its hiring practices, however, I argue that CHF precludes the possibility of victims
who do not fit its model, including complex victims.
In the following excerpt, Jovi warns volunteers during an in-service meeting not to
engage with callers on the hotline referred to in the field as “cranks.” Cranks are callers, typically
male, who call hotlines and describe acts of sexual violence in detail to get a reaction from
hotline volunteers (Matek 1980).
91

JOVI: Be careful, because when the cranks realize you’re willing
to talk to them, they’ll call back, they’ll remember, oh, [this
volunteer] works at 7 pm on Thursdays. [Jovi pauses] I know
myself. I have to check myself. When I hear a male voice, I try not
to assume it’s a crank or chronic.
Here, Jovi admits that she sometimes automatically assumes that
male callers to the hotline are crank callers. Following Jovi’s
warning, a veteran volunteer raised her hand to share her similar
relationship with male callers.
VOLUNTEER: One time I was standoffish with a male caller at
the beginning, but then I realized he was a real call, and actually
needed services. I apologized and told him that sometimes when I
get a male caller they’re just trying to get a reaction out of me.
Jovi and the volunteer here demonstrate how homophily in hiring practices limits the
organization’s capacity to serve multiple types of victims. CHF members admit to feeling
hesitant about serving male callers, despite the fact that one in six men experiences sexual
violence during their life. Because men are more likely to commit sexual and domestic violence,
they are also more likely to be complex victims of violence. Because of CHF staff are both more
demographically similar to and more willing to serve female victims, the organization lacks the
capacity to serve many complex victims.
This staffing issue emerges elsewhere in the organization as well. While CHF’s
intervention wing explicitly does not serve people who have perpetrated violence, its prevention
wing, at least in theory, is meant to engage directly with people who might be complex victims.
92

By going into schools and community groups, CHF members hope to teach primarily boys and
men how to engage in healthier relationships. As in the intervention department, however,
prevention volunteers and staff largely do not demographically mirror the audiences they hope to
reach. CHF provides its prevention education services primarily to youth of color in public
schools. Despite this audience population, most prevention volunteers are white, English-only,
and class privileged. Violet, a prevention staff member, reflects on this tension frequently. She
worries that volunteers’ racial and class positions limit their ability to communicate effectively
with youth.
VIOLET: We’re just trying to build their empathy by exposing
them to other communities. Many of our volunteers are a part of
the, uh, cis[gender] white woman community, so we just try to
show them, hey, there are other people out there. Who has time
and capacity to volunteer? White people, especially white women.
Violet describes volunteers’ racial identities as a problem to be overcome. During
trainings, Violet works to educate volunteers on racial justice issues, discussing the structural
barriers CHF’s clients often have to overcome. By presenting on communities with which
volunteers are less familiar, Violet hopes to improve their ability to engage effectively with
youth.
These efforts to surmount differences between volunteers’ and clients’ demographic
positions do not always succeed. Sophie, for example, describes a white male volunteer’s
experience presenting to a group of young Black and Latino men.
SOPHIE: He was doing this exact presentation [on structural
inequality in the U.S., like racism and classism] and said, “so in the
93

U.S., in our racial hierarchy, white people are at the top and people
of color below them.” He obviously meant that, as a system, white
people have more power, but students understood it as him saying
that white people should be more powerful than everybody else.
Although the volunteer Sophie describes here fully recognizes structural inequality, his
own racial identity leads to a miscommunication in the educational space. This demonstrates
that, oftentimes despite white volunteers’ best intentions, they may not be able to fully engage
with youth of color. This disconnect is perhaps more heightened for white women volunteers,
who make up a large portion of the volunteer pool. Because most sexual and domestic violence
is perpetrated by men, and because of CHF’s location in a majority-minority city and its
targeting of low income clients, many of the complex victims it might encounter would be men,
and particularly men of color. Its staff and volunteer demographic makeup present a barrier to
effectively serving this population.
This is not to say, of course, that white people cannot effectively engage with youth of
color, or that women cannot convincingly discuss gender-based violence with men. Violet, for
example, describes her successes implementing violence prevention education with a group of
6th-grade girls of color during an orientation for new prevention volunteers.
VIOLET: You’ll also see sometimes opportunities to teach in the
same classroom 10 weeks in a row. If you’re able to do this, it’s
one of the most rewarding experiences. I lead a girls’ group once a
week. When I started, they were like, who’s this white lady, but
now I come in and they’re like “Ms. Violet, Ms. Violet!” A lot of
our workshops are just a one time assembly on consent or
94

something like that. Those are great, and you’ll probably reach a
few kids, but this is how you make real change.
When Violet first began presenting to her group of girls, they distrusted her because of,
according to Violet, her racial identity. Over time, though, Violet was able to build trust with the
students, overcoming their demographic differences. This strategy, however, requires sustained,
long-term engagement, rather than the one time presentations CHF more often provides. Because
most CHF presentations are episodic, due both to staff and volunteer turnover and funding
constraints, CHF is rarely able to provide the sustained engagement required to work with
complex victims. Most volunteers cannot fit a weekly presentation into their schedules, and paid
staff members, disenchanted by the low pay or frustrating organization constraints, move on to
other jobs. Even Violet, one of CHF’s most committed prevention staff members, tells me she is
considering leaving.
VIOLET: I feel bad. I already told my 6th grade girls that I would
be back next year.
Violet, in considering other employment, balances the needs of her students with her own
career goals. She understands sustained prevention education as important for creating
behavioral change and reaching complex victims, but feels undervalued and overworked by
CHF. As such, she is considering leaving the organization. Staffing issues, including
demographic mismatch and high rates of turnover, inhibit the organization from effectively
reaching and sustaining engagement with complex victims of violence, work necessary to
develop alternatives to the carceral state. .
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
95

Since the 1970s, the United States has experienced a seismic shift in its criminal justice
system (National Research Council 2014). Over a four-decade period, rates of incarceration
increased over fourfold, bringing the number of incarcerated individuals to over two million.
While this project was politically popular in earlier decades, inspired by concerns over high rates
of violence and social unrest, the contemporary penal regime is increasingly unpopular (Dagan
and Teles 2014). Critics worry about the criminal justice system’s financial and social costs.
Despite these criticisms, however, rates of incarceration remain high. Penal reform targets soft
targets like youth and nonviolent offenders, and decarceration produces overcrowding rather than
real reductions in prison populations (Greene and Mauer 2010; Subramanian, Moreno, and
Broomhead 2014; Webster and Doob 2014).
Scholars explain the entrenchment of the criminal justice system by drawing on either
material or symbolic theoretical traditions. The material approach argues that the contemporary
penal regime persists because of its usefulness to capital (Wacquant 2009). In a neoliberal state
marked by deindustrialization and the resulting loss of good working-class jobs, prisons control a
newly-created sub-proletariat. Prisons also prevent workers involved in low wage service jobs
from resisting the inequitable economic regime. While most material arguments are structural,
some individual arguments show that workers employed by the criminal justice system, too,
resist reform because their own material interests are on the line. More symbolic arguments
suggest that the penal regime conveys meaning about society’s moral identity. The
criminalization of immigration, for example, reproduces racialized conceptions of citizenship.
While useful for describing the emergence of the current penal regime, I argue that
material and symbolic arguments are insufficient for understanding the regime’s persistence. The
above arguments rest on individuals’ agentic commitment to the criminal justice system –
96

politicians fishing for the votes of scared constituents and probation officers securing their future
employment, for example. This article shows that street-level members of the criminal justice
field are sometimes interested in its reform. Despite this political orientation, however,
organizational architecture – tangible features of organizations produced by symbolic and
material structures– inhibit reform even after changes in symbolic and material environments.
Drawing on 32 months of participant observation in an anti-gender-based violence
organization, this paper shows that, although advocates want criminal justice reform, their
organization’s architecture – its physical buildings, staffing patterns, and funding structures –
prevents workers from translating their antagonism towards the carceral state into reformative
action. I draw on the case of advocates’ orientations towards “complex victims,” an issue that
challenges the criminal justice system’s legitimacy. Advocates believe the criminal justice
system is an inappropriate way to respond to perpetrators of violence who are themselves
victims. The building’s physical organization, however, limits workers’ capacity to treat complex
victims on-site. Organizational homophily means CHF lacks staff capable of working with
complex victims, and high rates of turnover limit staff members’ ability to develop the capacity.
These two features of the organization’s architecture limit advocates’ ability to translate their
political desire and material potential for justice reform into reformative action.
These results first contribute to empirical literatures on gender-based violence. I identify
a population often ignored by the literature – complex victims. Because most perpetrators are
themselves victims of violence, learning how to both treat this population's existing harm and
prevent its perpetration of further violence is essential for the movement against gender-based
violence. This paper identifies several organizational features limiting the movement’s capacity
for implementing reforms it itself sees as necessary.
97

This paper’s central contribution, however, is to sociological and criminological
literatures on the entrenchment of the current penal regime. Whereas past literatures describe
how individuals’ material and symbolic interests entrench the criminal justice regime, this paper
shows how organizational architecture produces entrenchment despite symbolic and material
investment in alternatives. This insight will be particularly useful for understanding the
stubbornness of the carceral state as public attitudes towards the criminal justice system continue
to shift. To explain why punishment remains common despite growing public antagonism
towards it, scholars will need to pay attention to the mundane features of organizations, not only
to rhetorical claims about justice.

[1] I recognize the deep literature challenging the contemporary turn towards the therapeutic,
particularly in the gender-based violence field (see, for example, Sweet 2019). My intention here is not
to evaluate the effectiveness of CHF members’ proposed alternatives, but rather to demonstrate
their desire for alternatives to punishment.

98

Chapter 4:
“When you’re here, you’re not a militant feminist”: Managing Institutional Complexity in an
Anti-Gender-Based Violence Organization
ABSTRACT
Neoinstitutionalists identify diverse strategies people use to manage contradicting beliefs, norms,
rules, and practices within organizations. Missing, though, is attention to how organization
members learn these strategies. 30 months of participant observation in an anti-gender-based
violence organization show how members learn to manage tensions between their own institutional
logics and those of organizational partners. Past research paints organization members as either
passive carriers of static logics, or as fully agentic users of multiple logics. Results here show that,
while organization members are not “institutional dopes,” their creative, adaptive behaviors are
themselves patterned and learned.

99

Although organizations have always combined “institutional logics”—or systems of beliefs and
practices—from multiple sectors, including state, market, and civil society, the growth of new
institutional analysis has sparked increased interest in these “hybrids” (Clemens and Guthrie 2010;
Henriksen et al. 2015). Most scholars focus on organizational and field-level response to
institutional complexity, exploring the effects of multiple logics on organizational efficiency or
exploring changes in dominant institutions over time (Greenwood et al. 2011; Pache and Santos
2013). A smaller group of researchers, though, suggests that attention only to organizations masks
the individuals who inhabit them. They choose instead to explore how people interact with their
institutional environments (Hallett and Ventresca 2006).
Micro-institutionalists conceptualize individuals’ interactions with logics using what I
classify here as either socialization theories or agency theories. Socialization theories suggest that
individuals passively learn logics through their work experiences or education (Battilana and
Dorado 2010; Bourdieu 1980). Agency theories, conversely, argue that individuals creatively
adopt, manipulate, and discard competing logics in different contexts to serve their needs (Binder
2007; Smets et al. 2015). In this paper, I combine elements of both conceptualizations to build a
theory of logic identification that considers how actors learn to manipulate logics. Specifically, I
show here that people are not passive recipients of pre-formed, static logics, nor are they innately
creative masters of competing logics. Instead, through socialization processes in organizations,
individuals learn patterned strategies for agentically managing institutional complexity.
This paper’s empirical case is a nonprofit anti-gender-based violence organization in a
large city on the west coast of the United States. Nonprofits serve as ideal locations to explore
institutional complexity because they often host representatives of multiple social spheres (Barman
2016). Increasingly, the state contracts out its social service responsibilities to the nonprofit sector
100

which introduces a “state” logic to the sector (Henriksen et al. 2015; Smith and Lipsky 1995).
Concerns over the efficient use of taxpayer dollars, and competition from for-profit social
enterprises, are also driving the introduction of market logics to the nonprofit sector. These logics
join already-dominant “community” logics introduced by early grassroots volunteers and
“community members” (Thornton et al. 2012). This confluence of institutional logics sometimes
results in tensions, as the norms, motivations, and goals of each logic contradict the others. To
continue providing services and working towards the accomplishment of organizational goals,
individuals within nonprofits must successfully navigate this institutional complexity. Rape crisis
centers are a prototypical case: they receive city and state grants to serve clients, and they carry
out their work alongside (private) healthcare professionals and (state) law enforcement officials
and courts.
I conducted 30 consecutive months of participant observation in the anti-gender-based
violence field, both observing and feeling up close the interplay of competing logics. I participated
in two volunteer training programs, one for emergency intervention volunteers and the other for
prevention volunteers, and then assisted staff in training three additional cohorts of volunteers. I
also volunteered as a domestic violence counselor advocate for 26 months, and as a community
educator for 10 months. My ongoing participation, which I describe in-depth later in the paper,
allows me to track how volunteers’ logic identifications change over time. Since I volunteered
alongside one cohort of volunteers for over two years, I observed the beliefs and behaviors of new
volunteers, and watched how these patterns shifted as they spent more time with the organization.
In this paper, I show that many new volunteers enter with an adherence to what I call an
“activist logic.” As their organizational position within the nonprofit changes, though, they
increasingly identify with a “professional logic.” As opposed to what socialization theories
101

suggest, volunteers do not fully discard their activist logics in favor of the professional. Instead,
they recognize the utility of practicing a professional logic in certain contexts while maintaining
their commitment to an activist logic while in other spaces. Their strategies for
“compartmentalizing” the logics do not appear out of thin air, though (Kraatz and Block 2008).
Instead, I show how nonprofit staff train volunteers to compartmentalize their logics. This paper
contributes to institutional analysis by showing processes by which individuals learn strategies for
managing institutional complexity.
ORGANIZATION THEORY’S TREATMENT OF INSTITUTIONAL COMPLEXITY
Early neoinstitutionalists challenged theories of organizational rationality, showing that
organizations oftentimes behave irrationally and inefficiently (Meyer and Rowan 1977).
Organizational behavior is informed by institutions, or shared beliefs, norms, and rules. Over time,
through isomorphic processes, organizations occupying the same field tend to adhere to similar
institutions (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). This approach emphasized institutional stability,
though. To better think about how institutions change and how individuals on the ground work
with institutions, scholars advanced an institutional logics approach (Friedland and Alford 1991;
Rao et al. 2003; Thornton and Ocasio 1999; 2008). Logics connect institutions with action,
showing how patterned institutions are translated by individuals into practice. Even these newer
approaches, though, often conceptualize institutional logics as singular and dominant within fields;
while they can change over time, they change only from one dominant logic to another.
When researchers shift their level analysis down from societies and fields to the level of
organizations, complexity in institutional logics emerges. While earlier research emphasized
institutional homogeneity within fields, newer literature exposes institutional heterogeneity
(Greenwood et al. 2011). Multiple logics operate at the same time within fields (Kraatz and Block
102

2008). Organizations respond to these complex environments in varied ways – some abandon their
logic identifications to adhere more closely with dominant logics within the field, a practice that
aligns with an isomorphic perspective. Others buffer their internal operations from logics in the
field, maintaining one logic inside of their organization while espousing a different logic when
interacting with their field (Pache and Santos 2010).
While most research still studies institutional complexity at the level of organizations or
fields (Kellog 2011; Smets and Jarzabkowski 2013), a smaller group of micro-neoinstitutionalists
asks how people within organizations make sense of and enact logics. This “inhabited institutions”
perspective recognizes that organizations are not single organisms, but rather wholes composed of
many parts, including single actors and sub-organizational units (Hallett and Ventresca 2006).
Although not exact, a point on which I expand below, this literature can be organized into two
theoretical camps: socialization theories and agency theories.
The socialization theories, which appeared alongside early developments in
neoinstitutionalism, suggest that individuals learn logics through their education, professional
associations, and job experience (Almandoz 2014; Battilana and Dorado 2010). When individuals
enter organizations, they bring with them the logics with which they learned to identify in the past.
In social enterprise microloan corporations, for example, individuals must manage both banking
and development logics: the banking logic suggests that the corporation must make money and
satisfy shareholders, while a development logic suggests that the corporation must do good. When
organizations hire employees with an existing commitment to one or the other logic, tensions and
inefficiencies result. When organizations hire blank slate employees without prior logic
identifications, though, they can more easily socialize them into their preferred logic, creating a
more cohesive and productive workplace. This kind of research creates clear prescriptions for
103

organizations, which might want to create their ideal worker rather than select workers with
existing, and potentially competing, logic identifications.
While socialization theories treat workers largely as passive recipients of logics, theories
of individual agency show how workers creatively adopt, manipulate, and discard logics to serve
their purposes (McPherson and Sauder 2013; Smets et al. 2015). The idea is that people do not
zealously adhere to a single logic all the time in every place. Instead, people think of logics like
tools, picking them up, combining them, and discarding them at different points depending on
the requirements of the social situation (Pache and Santos 2013). Ambidextrous workers, fluent
in multiple logics, move seamlessly between different scenes, shifting their norms, beliefs, goals,
and practices as they do so (Jarzabkowski et al. 2013; McPherson and Sauder 2013). In a study
of a nonprofit transitional housing organization, for example, Binder shows how some
employees creatively deploy bureaucratized funding logics, which seem antithetical to a logic of
care, to support children’s welfare (2007). This shows how institutions are not monolithic and
static, but rather malleable in the hands of a creative worker. This kind of agency theory has been
criticized for an overemphasis on uniquely entrepreneurial individuals capable of shifting logics
(Bjerregaard and Jonasson 2014). Attempts to show how regular people navigate complex
institutions still take interactional strategies as innate characteristics of individuals, though.
I bring these two theories together here to theorize how individuals learn strategies for
interacting with institutions. Socialization theories are overly deterministic, suggesting that
individuals passively identify with a given logic depending on their past employment or
educational experiences. Agency theories, on the other hand, largely explore individuals’ creative
interactions with institutions at cross-sectional moments in time. Established professionals
expertly manipulate multiple logics to navigate complex institutional environments. Individuals
104

do not manifest strategies for negotiating complexity out of thin air, though. I bring these two
approaches together in this paper by exploring how individuals learn the strategies necessary for
interacting with institutional complexity.
THE ANTI-GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE FIELD
To explore this question, I draw on a 30-month ethnography in a rape crisis center called
the Center for Healthy Futures. The anti-gender-based violence movement, with its long history
of collaboration between activists, nonprofit professionals, law enforcement and the healthcare
industry, makes an ideal case for exploring the negotiation of complex field-level relationships.
Violence against women, including both domestic and sexual violence, first emerged as a social
problem in the 1970s (Davis and Carlson 1987; Dobash and Dobash 1979; Martin 1987). Early
efforts deployed grassroots volunteer labor and monetary donations to provide shelter, crisis
hotlines, and financial support to victims (Beaudry 1985; Pizzey 1974). Later, activists began
lobbying lawmakers, prosecutors, and the police to shift responses to violence, forcing formal legal
systems to take domestic and sexual violence seriously as crimes (Bumiller 2010). This dual
approach, service provision and criminal-legal advocacy, resulted in an anti-domestic violence
field that implicates multiple organizational stakeholders, including activists, nonprofits,
foundations, law enforcement, and healthcare professionals.
To manage its increasingly-complex organizational field, the anti-domestic violence
movement professionalized in the 1980s (Markowitz and Tice 2002; Messner et al. 2015). What
was initially a volunteer-led grassroots movement transformed into a highly-formalized collection
of nonprofit organizations, each hiring paid professional nonprofit managers, grant writers,
counselors, and sometimes even design teams. Still, volunteers constitute an important source of
105

labor in many nonprofits. They answer hotlines, provide crisis intervention services, host
educational events, and support fundraising efforts.
This transformation into a professionalized, organizationally-diverse movement has been
marked by growing pains. Like many welfare mixes, the anti-domestic violence movement, which
brings together volunteer activists, professional nonprofits managers, the police, healthcare
professionals, philanthropic foundations, and more experiences conflicting institutional logics. As
scholars have noted, feminisms are varied (Martin 1990). As such, so too are the prescribed
solutions. Broadly, though, participants in the movement can be sorted into either activist or
professional camps. Activists envision interventions outside of established systems like the courts,
while professionals operate within them (INCITE 2017; Zilber 2002).
Within domestic violence organizations, police, who view gender-based violence through
the lens of criminal-legal crime prevention, sometimes clash with volunteer activists who
conceptualize domestic and sexual violence as problems of men’s patriarchal domination of
women (Arnold and Ake 2013; Moylan and Lindhorst 2015). The same activists, who think of
their work as a project of social change, might also come into conflict with nonprofit managers
who package their work as liberal social welfare provision to appeal to the foundations and
government agencies providing financial support (Markowitz and Tice 2002; Martin 1990).
Volunteers even compete with one another, with some believing the movement requires a radical
overthrow of structural patriarchy while others want only to provide victims with emotional
support (Fried 1994; Zilber 2002).
The gender-based violence prevention field is not unique in its institutional complexity.
Beginning in the 1960s, the welfare state in the U.S. began contracting out its social service
responsibilities to nonprofit organizations (Smith and Lipsky 1995). Nonprofits that receive
106

government funding, like organizations occupying the gender-based violence prevention field, are
expected to professionalize. To compete for funding and effectively collaborate with government
agencies, nonprofits learn the language, norms, goals, and preferred technologies of the state.
Nonprofits ranging from day cares to drug abuse treatment centers experienced the shift towards
professionalization documented in rape crisis centers above. My examination of the gender-based
violence prevention field here, then, is just a case of a broader phenomenon. Many organizations,
to maintain their survival and serve their clients, must navigate institutional complexity.
METHODS
This paper draws on almost 700 hours of ethnography in an anti-gender-based violence
organization collected over 30 consecutive months. Past researchers of institutional logics have
successfully used ethnography to show how people on the front lines of organizations interact with
institutional logics (Bjerregaard and Lauring 2012; Bjerregaard and Jonasson 2014). Since my
interest here is in how individuals’ capacity for managing logics shifts over time, ethnography,
with its attention to process, is the ideal method. Towards the end of my ethnographic involvement,
I also conducted 20 interviews to ensure my findings aligned with participants’ experiences within
the organization.
As my research site, I selected the Center for Healthy Futures (CHF)
8
, a nonprofit
organization in a large metropolitan area on the west coast of the United States. CHF members

8
The Center for Healthy Futures is a pseudonym but captures the organization’s stated mission.
Although focused on domestic and sexual violence, CHF works to create a future free of all
forms of interpersonal violence. All names have been changed to protect participants’
confidentiality.

107

refer to their organization alternately as a rape crisis center, a trauma recovery center, a violence
prevention organization, and a domestic violence organization. Members are not confused about
the identity of their organization; rather, the organization is all of these things. Founded in the early
1970s, the organization originally provided a rape crisis hotline and criminal-legal advocacy for
victims of sexual and domestic violence. Since then, the mission has expanded as the
organization’s broader environmental context shifted. Preferred technologies of gender-based
violence prevention organizations shifted in favor of therapeutic, medicalized approaches. To
accommodate, CHF professionalized, hiring more social workers and counselors to provide
trauma-informed therapy and groups for clients. City and state grants prompted expansion into
domestic violence response teams which coordinate the actions of advocates from CHF, police
officers, and medical professionals. Additional grants, and a field-level adherence to public health
models, prompted an “upstream” approach whereby volunteers and staff head into schools,
workplaces, and community organizations to provide violence prevention education (Greenberg
2019). This multi-pronged approach to violence prevention and intervention makes the
organization difficult for participants to categorize but provides opportunities for exploring the
management of multiple competing logics.
To support its multiple workstreams, which include emergency hotlines and
accompaniments for rape and domestic violence victims, violence prevention education, legal
advocacy, case management, group counseling, and self-defense classes, CHF employs a paid staff
of 65 and over 200 volunteers. Volunteers are divided primarily into two discrete groups which
rarely interact with one another: intervention and prevention. Intervention volunteers respond to
acute incidents of violence, staffing both the crisis hotline and the domestic violence response
team. They provide services to victims of sexual and domestic violence over the phone, at police
108

stations, at the scene of domestic violence incidents, and in forensic examinations following sexual
assault. Intervention volunteers work once a week for 4-8 hours. Prevention volunteers, on the
other hand, hope to teach people strategies to avoid committing acts of violence. These volunteers
teach middle and high school students about healthy and unhealthy relationships, sexual and
domestic violence, and social inequality. They also go into workplaces and other community
organizations occasionally to present on more specific topics like workplace sexual harassment.
Prevention volunteers give 2-3 presentations each month.
This paper focuses primarily on volunteer training because volunteering is a key socializing
experience for most CHF members. Like in many similar organizations, almost all CHF staff enter
the organization as volunteers before getting hired on as staff. All staff members, even those who
did not previously volunteer with the organization, are required to undergo the mandatory training
for either prevention or intervention volunteers. All CHF members, then, experience the same
highly structured training sequence which provides them with the information they need for
conducting their work. By specifically studying training, I learn how CHF members’ logic
identifications shift over time, and how they learn to interact with their complex institutional
environment.
To track how logic identifications develop, I observed and participated in both prevention
and intervention training sequences. Intervention training, which began in January of 2017, lasted
72 hours. Prevention training, beginning in June of 2018, lasted 65 hours. I also attended monthly
in-service meetings, which are required for all CHF volunteers, beginning in April of 2017.
Beginning in January of 2019, I also volunteered as a “coach” for three cohorts of new prevention
and intervention volunteers. In this capacity, I assisted staff members in training new volunteers.
As a coach, I was privy to staff members’ conversations about strategies for preparing new
109

volunteers to enter the field. Staff members also discussed volunteers about whom they were
concerned, which illuminated for me the logics most valued, and most concerning, for staff
members.
To understand the full experience of volunteering for CHF, I also volunteered as both an
intervention and prevention volunteer following my completion of training. In order to protect the
confidentiality of victims seeking services from CHF, I do not present direct excerpts from my
volunteer work here. Instead, volunteering informed my understanding of the data from
educational spaces and helps in forming the relationships necessary with CHF staff and volunteers
for deep ethnographic analysis. Table 1 details the 680+ hours spent in the field between January
2017 and June 2019.
Finally, in May and June of 2019, I also conducted interviews with staff and volunteers.
Interviews lasted between 1-2 hours and covered topics ranging from motivations for joining CHF,
to what an average shift looks like, to most frustrating and most exciting interactions with
survivors. I use interviews as an opportunity to identity disconnects between my observations and
participants perceptions of the organization. I do not use interviews to generate themes. Instead,
they serve as a final check on the validity of my findings as I prepared to exit the field. In total, I
conducted 20 interviews, 10 with staff members and 10 with volunteers. I interviewed most “line
workers” both in intervention and prevention. These staff members, in collaboration with
volunteers, provide the bulk of CHF’s services. To recruit volunteers, I sent emails to the shared
list servs and also reached out individually to the few “veteran volunteers” who have been with
CHF for 3+ years.
Trainings consisted of presentations from CHF staff members and from representatives of
partner organizations, including law enforcement, the courts, and medical professionals.
110

Volunteers sat behind tables either arranged in a horseshoe shape or in several long rows, all
oriented towards a television at the front of the multipurpose room. Presenters used the television
to display slideshows to volunteers, many of whom took detailed notes on information provided.
Each day of training lasted between 3-8 hours. Most days began with introductions and a check-
in question, and all had several breaks throughout, during which volunteers stretched their legs,
ate, got coffee, or used the bathroom. These breaks allowed for casual socialization, which
provided me opportunities to conduct unstructured interviews, asking participants for their
reflections on training materials. I adhered to standard ethnographic methods, jotting notes during
presentations and trainings, striving to capture both direct quotes from presenters and more
nuanced social interactions, including variations in tone, bodily comportment, and speech patterns
(Emerson et al. 2011). Since many trainees wrote notes during presentations, my notetaking likely
did not impact the space. Shortly after each training session, I typed extensive fieldnotes based on
the original jottings. These fieldnotes constitute the bulk of my data. Interviews were recorded and
fully transcribed.
Data collection and analysis was guided by the extended case method (Burawoy 1998).
Sensitized by past literature on tensions between more traditionally grassroots feminists and
nonprofit professionals within anti-gender-based violence organizations (Zilber 2002), I entered
the field interested in how these tensions are managed. I coded the data to identify patterned sets
of motivations and prescribed actions, which form complete logics. Using my ethnographic data,
then, I was able to track how individuals’ logic identifications shifted over time, exposing the
mechanisms by which change happens.
RESULTS
111

This paper’s strength is its attention to process (Abbott 1998). To best capture the process
by which volunteers’ logic identification’s change, I present the data chronologically, following
volunteers’ logic identifications from pre-training stages, through three stages of training, and
concluding with their logic identifications after training. By presenting a chronological view of
logic identification, I risk suggesting that the process is linear for all volunteers. Outliers exist at
every stage, and as past research has suggested, individuals constantly construct logics through
interaction: logics are never static (Smets and Jarzabkowski 2013). The chronological view instead
presents broad patterns in logic identification, showing how volunteers’ logic identifications shift
as they move structurally through the organization.
Competing Institutional Logics
Multiple patterned sets of motivations and practices emerged within CHF. Because I am
interested in how organizations manage conflicting logics, I focus here on the two dominant logics
most antithetical to one another: the activist logic and professional logic. While the professional
logic is more fully-articulated than the activist logic, both do contain internal motivations and
prescribed actions. Table 2 provides a brief overview of both the activist and professional logics,
showing how they differently conceptualize their goals, behaviors, and relationships with partner
organizations.
I present here two excerpts, the first demonstrating the activist logic and the second the
professional. First, consider an interaction between Jade, a volunteer, and Marta, a CHF supervisor,
during a monthly in-service meeting. Marta asked volunteers to brainstorm answers to the
question, “what is the greatest threat facing CHF?”
JADE: I think the biggest threat is law enforcement. If you track it
back to slavery, law enforcement is literally founded on white
112

supremacy. Officers, their job was to tack any bullshit charge on
Black people to send them back into slavery. One bad apple really
can spoil the bunch. Law enforcement can never be just, especially
for Black people. I want us to forget about law enforcement. They’re
not gonna help us. We need to develop a sort of underground
railroad, for real.
MARTA: Thank you, Jade. That’s how we used to operate, back in
1971 when we first started. When advocates and law enforcement
were [Marta clenches her hands into fists and collides them into each
other aggressively], when they weren’t really supportive of what we
were trying to do. It takes a lot of education, and a lot of hard work.
KATRINA: [Another volunteer, turning around in her seat to
address Jade] Okay, I hear you, I’m with you. What does that look
like, though, for you?
JADE: Literally an underground railroad. If someone reports, we
have connections, people where we can send them. You need to get
out? Sure, come stay at my house. Like that.
MARTA: We have that [shouting excitedly, before lowering her
voice]! I mean, we have that. We leave it up to the victim, whatever
she wants. If she wants to report to the police, great, if not, great.
We have these two tracks already,
Jade orients herself in opposition to existing systems for addressing gender-based violence.
While individuals expressing commitment to the professional logic, like Marta, value relationships
113

with law enforcement, Jade wants to distance herself from them. This normative ideology, founded
on early feminist ideas of law enforcement as necessarily patriarchal (and, updated for the 21
st

century, necessarily racist), informs Jade’s prescribed action. She wants to create a new system,
entirely separate from law enforcement, to support victims of violence.
Compare Jade’s logic to that of Elisa, a CHF training coordinator. Elisa here is discussing
protocol for interacting with law enforcement officers while providing support to victims.
ELISA: Sometimes we’ll have negative interactions with officers.
When we debrief the incident with officers and nurses, they might
say some not nice things. Some officers aren’t very nice, so they’ll
say victim blamey things. If we feel comfortable, we can try to
educate the officers. Never do this in front of the survivor though.
Ask if you can speak outside. We have to make the experience with
survivors really positive. They have to feel good about their
experience with us.
Elisa here demonstrate the professional logic in action. The goal is to make survivors’
experiences within the current system (i.e. rape kit exams for court proceedings) “really positive.”
To accomplish this, volunteers must work with law enforcement. Rather than creating a new
system, adherents to the professional logic want to make improvements within the existing system.
How Logic Identifications Change Over Time
Previous research on institutional logics thinks largely of people as firm adherents to one
dominant logic. When multiple logics emerge within an organization, conflicts emerge as
followers of different logics dual over their preferred goals and practices. I show instead here that
114

individuals’ logic identifications change over time. This process is intentional within CHF. Below
is an excerpt from Elisa’s welcome to new volunteers on their first day of training.
ELISA: Welcome to the family, because it is a family. You’re going
to learn a new language, learn new things about yourself. New ideas,
new beliefs. You’re going to be a very different person at the end of
training.
Elisa foreshadows, suggesting that volunteers will shed their incoming activist logics for
CHF’s preferred professional logic. Through my chronological tracking of volunteers’ logic
identifications, though, I show that volunteers do not abandon their old languages, their old ideas,
their old beliefs. Instead, they learn strategies for compartmentalizing their logics.
Applicant: activist logic identified
Before entering the program, prospective volunteers must complete an online application
and an in-person or phone interview. The online application is open-ended, asking applicants why
they want to volunteer for the program what skills they bring. During the interview, though,
applicants are asked explicitly about their ideological beliefs. During my phone interview for
CHF’s prevention program, for example, Violet, the training coordinator, asks me about a battery
of feminist issues.
VIOLET: On a scale from 1 to 10, how comfortable are you with
abortion?
Since we had been talking about my availability and access to
transportation, I am a bit caught off guard.
AUTHOR: Um, 10.
VIOLET: What about transgender individuals?
115

AUTHOR: [more confidently now] 10.
Violet continues, telling me the organization is “pro-choice” in
every way – from abortion to victim’s decision about prosecution or
leaving an abusive partner.
VIOLET: Is that okay with you?
AUTHOR: Yes. 10, yeah.
VIOLET: Great. So, as you know, most people involved in this
movement are women. What responsibility, if any, do you think men
have in the movement?
AUTHOR: Um, well [laughing nervously]. That’s complicated. I
think in general, most violence is perpetrated by men, so it’s men
who have to stop committing violence. Also from a prevention
perspective, there’s the idea that men will listen to men more than
they will to women, so it’s men’s responsibility to educate other
men. But from an intersectional perspective, I think men have
different responsibilities in the movement. Like we know that men
also experience violence, especially queer men. And men won’t
listen to all men. Like a trans man or queer man might not be as
effective at educating like, men in a frat[ernity] than maybe a more
masculine presenting man.
VIOLET: Wow, yeah, that’s a great answer.
During my interview, I demonstrated my identification with an activist logic. I vocalized
my general agreement with the causes advanced by activists in the feminist movement. Activists
116

fought, and continue to fight, to preserve women’s right to make choices concerning their own
bodies. I signal my identification with this belief through my comfort with abortion. I also signal
my activist identification through my belief in men’s responsibility for joining the movement.
Activists in the movement have long argued that rape is not a women’s problem and is instead a
men’s problem. This conceptualization of the problem shifts responsibility onto men, an idea that
I identify with through my response to Violet’s question regarding men’s responsibility. By asking
these questions, and valuing certain responses, Violet effectively recruits only volunteers who are
activist-identified. Before training begins, then, volunteers are activist-identified.
During my own interviews with CHF staff and volunteers, I asked what brought them to
the organization. While a few became acquainted with the organization as victims of violence, or
the friends/family of victims, most sought out the organization for political reasons. Many
participants cited ongoing political conversations as motivations for joining the organization.
Frustrated by women’s shared experiences with violence, respondents sought opportunities to
create social change. Two volunteers, Maisie and Maxine, responded in typical ways to my
question about motivations for joining CHF.
AUTHOR: So what brought you to CHF?
MAISIE: The whole Kavanaugh vs. Ford [Congressional hearing].
I was watching that and I was just like so upset. I got like a little
triggered. I’ve always been the type of person that, it’s cool that you
represent something and you want to talk about it, but actually do
something. You can Tweet as much as you want, but I feel like it’s
different when you’re actually putting your hand’s work into it.
117

That’s what kinda triggered me. You know what, I wanna be part of
this, I wanna actually do something.
Later, I asked Maxine the same question.
MAXINE: I was watching this documentary. The subject is about
all the rape kits that are never tested. After coming from the
entertainment industry, and all the sexual harassment, the terrible
environment, the toxic masculinity, the pay disparity, and then, you
know, insult to injury, I come to discover that these thousands and
thousands of rape kits are not tested, I thought, what the fuck? I was
outraged.
Both Maisie and Maxine cite politically contentious issues to explain their membership in
CHF. For Maisie, it was Dr. Ford’s public allegation that now Justice Kavanaugh had sexually
assaulted her when they were both in high school. For Maxine, it was a movie documenting law
enforcement’s failure to test many forensic examinations for evidence following sexual assaults,
along with a slate of other feminist issues like workplace sexual harassment and gender pay
disparities. Activist logics, then, where individuals identify social problems and solutions meant
to ameliorate them, are common prior to entry into the organization.
Early trainee: activist logic identified
Volunteers’ activist identifications were apparent during the early stages of training as well.
Activist identification came both from volunteers, who had been screened for their identification
prior to enrollment in the training program, and from CHF staff who explicitly encouraged an
activist identification. On the first day of intervention training, for example, a group of almost 50
volunteers, mostly women save two, crowded into a hot conference room in CHF’s main office.
118

Staff spent the first few minutes of training ducking into offices and smaller meeting rooms dotting
the perimeter of the conference room to find enough chairs for all the volunteers, several of whom
were standing, crowded in the back of the room. I was sitting in the front of the room, having
arrived early. During a break, I turned to a new volunteer sitting next to me and remarked on how
crowded it was.
AUTHOR: I wasn’t expecting so many people.
MAEGAN: Yeah. I was talking to Elisa (the training coordinator).
Apparently, this is the biggest group they’ve had in a long time.
After the election [of Donald Trump] a lot of people wanted to get
involved.
Training, which began in January of 2017, closely followed Donald Trump’s election as
the 45
th
President of the United States. Prior to his election, recordings surfaced of Donald Trump
joking about engaging in nonconsensual sexual interaction with women. He also made explicit
threats to legalized abortion and minimized women’s experiences of sexual and domestic violence.
Maegan, recalling a conversation she had with Elisa, the intervention training coordinator,
hypothesizes that the current cohort of volunteers is big in direct response to Trump’s election.
Volunteers adhere to an activist-identified logic, which advocates sexual consent, victim advocacy,
and women’ right to make choices about their bodies. Their involvement with CHF feels, to them,
like a natural way to practice their activist logic.
Over a year later during prevention training, which began in June of 2018, both volunteers
and CHF staff expressed similar sentiments. Violet, the prevention training coordinator, began the
first day of training by asking volunteers to introduce themselves.
119

VIOLET: Give us your name and your preferred gender pronoun –
do we all know what I mean when I say “preferred gender pronoun?”
[a few volunteers nod] Okay good. Um, and also tell us why you’re
here. Why did you decide to volunteer for CHF?
[volunteers go around the room, sharing their reasons for
involvement. Many personally experienced domestic or sexual
violence, or are close with someone who did. Others share reasons
for participation that align closely with an activist logic.]
ESME: So many of my friends have been sexually assaulted. In
college, it made me so mad. But it’s not enough to get mad about it.
I decided it’s time for me to actually get off my butt and do
something.
NONA: During undergrad, I was a part of a group that did work
around issues of sexual violence on campus. I remember this one
time we were handing out flyers, not even protesting, but, like,
handing out informational flyers outside of a board meeting that was
happening on campus. This couple was walking towards me and I
handed a flyer out towards the woman, and her husband reached out
and swatted it away, literally swatted [the volunteer makes a
swatting motion]. I was shocked. I know it’s not the worst abuse,
but it really stuck with me. Denying someone access to knowledge
is the worst kind of violence.
120

Esme and Nona chose to join CHF for reasons aligned with an activist logic. The volunteers
identified a social problem when discussing their motivation to volunteer: high rates of sexual
violence victimization among women, denial of access to education to women, and backlogs in
rape kit testing. They joined CHF because they perceived the organization as being directly
involved in solving the social problems in which they were interested. These motivations all align
closely with an activist logic, which both identifies social problems, and locates sources of and
solutions to the problem within institutions rather than within individuals. Importantly, CHF staff
members create this space early on in the training sequence to create a community which shares
common motivations.
CHF staff even encourage an activist logic identification early in training. Volunteers see
themselves as participants in a broader social movement to right social inequalities. Dolly, CHF’s
executive director, explicitly promotes this kind of thinking, telling volunteers that they are joining
an “army” fighting against political and social conservatism.
DOLLY: We’re a feminist organization. We believe in creating
healthy alternatives to violence. Sometimes you have to challenge
systems. We’re living in a difficult political time. They describe
politics as a pendulum, not as a circle. It goes back and forth between
progress, and… We’re losing some of the gains we’ve made. But
what does backlash tell us? Progress. It’s a reaction to progress.
You’re a part of the Center for Healthy Futures. You’re a part in
making sure we keep progressing forward. The other side has their
army. We need our army.
121

Dolly’s introduction comes in June of 2018, a time when activists perceived threats to
gender equality from the federal government. Donald Trump, long plagued by sexual assault
allegations, was under investigation for allegedly attempting to cover up his sexual infidelity, in
violation of campaign finance laws. His administration made threats to protections for
undocumented victims of domestic violence. Rumors also circulated that a future supreme court
nomination might jeopardize the legalization of abortion. Dolly welcomes volunteers to the “army”
fighting against these threats to gender equality. By alluding to these issues – consent, fidelity,
gender-based violence, women’s access to choice – Dolly encourages an identification with an
activist logic. The organization, too, is explicitly feminist, a movement which follows an activist
logic: one that identifies social problems and fights to remedy them, oftentimes requiring adherents
to, as Dolly put it, “challenge systems.”
Mid/late trainee: professional logic inductee
When volunteers first enter the organization, their location aligns well with an activist
logic. An activist logic provides impetus for original involvement. Ideas about inequality, justice,
and political resistance serve as vocabularies of motive for volunteering. As volunteers spend more
time in the organization, though, they are introduced to on-the-ground work processes. While an
activist logic works for justifying involvement, it fails to justify all of the work that volunteers and
CHF staff do with clients and organizational partners. To accommodate these inconsistencies, CHF
staff slowly introduce volunteers to a professional logic. The professional logic encourages
partnership and diplomacy between organizational partners, including the state and law
enforcement. Under an activist logic, relationships with law enforcement are contentious. A
professional logic, on the other hand, justifies diplomacy as a method for creating incremental
122

change. This new logic helps volunteers make sense of changing responsibilities due to their
shifting location within the organization.
Gabby, a CHF staff member, introduces intervention volunteers to the professional logic
below. In this excerpt, Eva, a volunteer, signals her continuing identification with an activist logic.
Gabby empathizes with her logic identification, but then suggests the professional logic as an
alternative.
EVA: How is it working with law enforcement usually? Where I
used to volunteer, I would sometimes run into cops who would
refuse to arrest someone because they didn’t seem like “the type”
[air quotes]. [Using an ironic tone] If they’re white and have a good
job, they can’t be perpetrators.
GABBY: We see that a lot. We can’t support survivors without law
enforcement, though. Although working with law enforcement may
sometimes be frustrating, diplomacy is key. This was hard for me in
the beginning. Sometimes you get a law enforcement officer that’s
being a big jerk. That doesn’t mean we have to be a jerk back,
though. We have to keep ourselves in check and stay professional.
If we encounter an officer doing something, check in with the
dispatcher, figure out the best route to take. Don’t act rashly. The
bad behavior will be taken care of at some point. Your reaction
shouldn’t be aggressive in the moment, though.
Volunteers at this point have been in training for almost a month, putting them almost
exactly at the halfway point. As evidenced by Eva, they still align closely with an activist logic,
123

viewing law enforcement as an impediment to equality and justice, rather than a professional
partner. Gabby responds to Eva by tactfully combining an activist logic with a professional logic.
First, Gabby affirms Eva’s activist logic, acknowledging that law enforcement officers take some
types of people more seriously as offenders than others. This aligns with an activist logic, which
concerns itself with systemic inequality. Specifically, here Eva and Gabby worry that the police
more easily criminalize men of color than they do white men, allowing white men to escape
prosecution. By affirming Eva’s existing logic before introducing a new logic, Gabby eases the
transition in identification.
After signaling her critical stance towards law enforcement, Gabby then tells volunteers
that CHF’s partnership with the police is essential for service provision. This is the core of the
professional logic: to accomplish organizational goals, CHF must maintain healthy working
relationships with organizational partners. Under the activist logic, action, motivated by a
commitment to equality, is oriented against oppressive systems. Under the professional logic,
action is motivated by a commitment to collaboration towards helping individual victims.
Gabby models the transition from an activist to a professional logic by sharing her own
trajectory through the organization. Like most staff, Gabby started as a volunteer. When she first
joined the organization, she identified with an activist logic and struggled to work alongside the
police. As she progressed through the organization, though, her identification became more
professional, culminating in her current belief that CHF could not provide its services without the
police.
Prevention training followed a similar trajectory. Volunteers, as I show above, entered the
organization activist-identified. In the middle of training, CHF staff began introducing volunteers
124

to the professional logic. For example, Sophie, the director of prevention services at CHF, shares
a story about how law enforcement responded to a 9-1-1 call of suspected sex trafficking.
SOPHIE: A woman saw a man basically dragging a woman into a
tent, they appeared to be homeless. She was clearly incapacitated. It
took police a long time to respond, they didn’t want to respond, so
the woman called again. She was just standing there watching them.
When the police finally showed up, they didn’t want to talk to them,
but the caller insisted. Then, they only talked to the man! They came
back and told the caller, “he said he was just bringing her back to
her tent where she lived.” They didn’t want to talk to her because
she was under the influence. But like, if she was drugged out, how
could she consent? [Sophie groans in frustration]. I’m not meaning
to be like, boo law enforcement, but this case really pissed me off.
MAXINE: [A volunteer, calling out from the audience] To protect
and serve my ass!
SOPHIE: [Laughing, before adopting a serious tone]. Here at CHF,
we have to have a relationship with law enforcement. We work with
police a lot, and couldn’t do a lot of what we do without them.
As in the example from intervention training, above Sophie first signals her sympathy for
an activist logic. She expresses her frustration with law enforcement’s response to a potential sex
trafficking call, in which an incapacitated woman was being physically moved by a man. Maxine’s
interjection illustrates her continuing identification with an activist logic. Under this logic, law
enforcement are conceptualized as antipathic targets of activist organizing. Like above, this
125

excerpt comes about halfway through training. Volunteers, like Maxine, are still activist-identified.
Seeing this, Sophie takes the opportunity to introduce a professional logic. Although she
sympathizes with an activist logic, Sophie instead uses a professional logic, arguing that CHF
could not do its work without police support. Like Gabby, Sophie eases the transition between an
activist and professional logic identification by signaling to volunteers that she agrees with them
politically, but adopts a professional logic for the sake of the organization.
Volunteer: professional logic identified
While the activist logic still emerged frequently in the middle of training, by the end it had
largely disappeared. Volunteers and staff both instead frequently engaged with the professional
logic, encouraging collaboration with organization partners, including law enforcement, medical
professionals, and educators. Earlier in training, professional logic identifications came only from
CHF staff, or occasionally from volunteers who had personal ties to law enforcement or had
worked in rape crisis centers in the past. Towards the end of training, though, most volunteers
espoused a professional logic, signaling their full transition away from an activist logic.
Below, Violet presents to prevention volunteers on the dress code for volunteer shifts out
in the community. This excerpt comes from the last day of training, by which point volunteers
have almost fully adopted a professional logic identification.
VIOLET: You’re representing CHF. If you’re questioning it, don’t
wear it. That’s a good rule. Yes, it’s empowerment, I wanna wear
what I wanna wear, but if I’m in a room with 30 officers, I can’t
control what they think of me. It sucks, but if I’m wearing a low
shirt or a crop top or something, they might have some ideas about
me. [Volunteers begin asking specific questions: “should we follow
126

the fingertip rule [where shorts or skirts must be longer than one’s
extended fingertips],” and “Are there T-shirts we can wear?”].
SHADI: [a volunteer raises her hand] It’s not about you, it’s about
CHF. I get it, freedom of expression is great on your own time, but
when we’re presenting it’s about CHF.
VIOLET: Thank you, Shadi, that’s a perfect segue into my next
point. Your personal agenda doesn’t matter. I am super anti-police.
Sometimes I have to talk to a DA or a cop for my job, though. It
sucks, but I do it because I’m representing CHF. You have your own
agenda…. You came here because you’re especially passionate
about a particular topic. But when you’re here, you’re representing
CHF.
SOPHIE: On Violet’s first day of training, she came in and
introduced herself, “Hi, I’m Violet and I’m a militant feminist.”
[Volunteers erupt in laughter. Violet buries her face in her hands in
mock embarrassment and turns away from the audience].
VIOLET: [Turning back to the audience] I didn’t know any better!
[A volunteer sitting next me to turns to me and whispers, “I heard
she came in on her first day wearing Doc Martens and super bright
red lipstick”].
SOPHIE: It’s fine if you’re a militant feminist when you’re off the
clock. When you’re at CHF, you’re not a militant feminist.
127

Above, Violet encourages behavior strongly aligned with a professional logic. When
completing their volunteer shifts, volunteers must “think about their audience,” as Sophie puts it.
They are expected to wear professional clothes that reflect the space in which they are presenting.
Violet acknowledges that this contradicts an activist logic, which prioritizes individual choice and
expression, especially for women whose physical presentations are often policed. Rather than
protesting this professionalism, volunteers instead clarify, inquiring into the appropriateness of
specific hypothetical outfits. This suggests that volunteers are comfortable with a professional
logic.
Shadi more explicitly demonstrates her comfort with a professional logic. Whereas earlier
in the training, professional logic identification came largely from CHF staff, here it comes from
Shadi, a volunteer. Shadi encourages volunteers to forego their individual expression in favor of a
professional presentation that will facilitate communication between CHF and its partner
organizations. This shows how, by the end of training, volunteers largely adopt a professional logic
identification rather than an activist identification.
Sophie, through her humorous anecdote, shares that Violet shared a similar trajectory
through the organization as Gabby above. When she first entered the organization as a volunteer,
Violet adhered close to an activist logic, even self-identifying as a “militant feminist.” As she
progressed through the organization, though, eventually taking on a paid staff role, Violet instead
adopted a professional logic. This shows that Violet’s logic identification is tied to her location
within the organization. As Sophie suggests, volunteers can adhere to whichever logic they choose
when outside of the organization; while acting in the capacity of a CHF volunteer, though, they
must identify with a professional logic.
Where Does the Activist Logic Go?
128

Through training, volunteers learn to emphasize a professional logic when working with
organizational partners, especially law enforcement. This is not a case of institutional sublimation,
though. The professional logic does not entirely replace the activist logic. Rather, staff encourage
volunteers to move their activist logics into compartments deemed appropriate. Recall Jade’s
interaction with CHF staff above. Jade criticized law enforcement as an extension of racist slave
patrol in the United States. This conversation happened during a monthly in-service, a space
generally closed to organizational partners. Staff encourage these critical conversations in CHF-
only spaces. Volunteers learn, though, to remain uncritical when interacting with extra-
organizational partners. Even Jade gets along with law enforcement with she is representing CHF.
For example, consider this interaction between Jade and Detective Fisher during a volunteer
training for which Jade served as a coach.
I’m sitting with two other coaches in a small office next to CHF’s
conference room waiting for volunteers’ presentation on law
enforcement’s response to sexual assault to finish. We’re sorting
paperwork, preparing to conduct role plays with the current batch of
trainees. After the presentation finishes Adriana, a staff member,
enters the office followed by Detective Fisher, who was presenting
on sexual assault.
ADRIANA: Have you all met Detective Fisher? She used to be our
DVRT officer over at [nearby police division].
JADE: [getting out of her chair] Yes, good to see you!
DET. FISHER: [hugging Jade} Good to see you!
JADE: Where do they have you now?
129

DET. FISHER: I’m working sex crimes.
JADE: Okay, good for you! Is that a move up?
DET. FISHER: [hesitantly] Yeah. It’s a challenge.
JADE: Is that good, though?
DET. FISHER: Yeah, I like it. I like working cases, getting
convictions.
JADE: [snapping her fingers] Yesssss, yesssss, alright.
DET. FISHER: It’s a challenge.
Jade frequently critiques law enforcement. She argues that law enforcement officers
sometimes victimize survivors of violence and fail to effectively treat or reform perpetrators of
violence. Law enforcement instead, for Jade, serves as an enforcer of racial hierarchy in the U.S.
Despite these activist critiques, made during CHF-only conversations, Jade maintains friendly
relationships with individual law enforcement officers when representing CHF. This shows that
CHF members compartmentalize their competing logics. Activist logics are encouraged, or at least
tolerated, when CHF members are interacting with only one another. When interacting with
organizational partners, though, CHF members prioritize their professional logics.
In an interview, Josie, a staff member, tells me about her frustration with law enforcement.
AUTHOR: How have your interactions been with law
enforcement?
JOSIE: [laughing] Depends on the law enforcement. There are
some really great police officers out there, I recognize that. And
there are other police officers… [pauses] it’s a stressful job, I get
that, but that’s also why they shouldn’t be working with people
130

who have just experienced trauma. I’ve heard police officers say
things that make me uncomfortable and our workplace encourages
us to just kind of forget that we heard them because we’re in their
playing field and we should respect that, which I don’t really agree
with. I don’t wanna make myself invisible in any situation. I’ve
had police call survivors hos, make fun of what they’re wearing.
I’ve had police officers be really racialized, call a man of color
ugly from his mugshot, make fun of his mustache because he was a
Latino man. I get that they need to laugh about something, but that
permeates into the work that they do, it creates biases.
AUTHOR: Do you feel pressured to stay quiet?
JOSIE: Yeah, absolutely. Even if I wanted to say something, I’m in
a room full of cops, I just don’t feel comfortable. And also, when
you tell your supervisors this, they would say, well, you know, it’s
really not our place to say something about that. We can have a
conversation with them, but honestly, what are we gonna do, what
are we gonna say? They’re the ones inviting us into their station,
allowing us to do this work, giving us the money, so what are we
supposed to do if they say something out of pocket? We’re
supposed to complain? They’re not gonna do anything! They don’t
do anything if a cop kills someone, they’re not gonna do anything
if a cop says something problematic.
131

Although Josie holds strong critiques of law enforcement, going so far as to suggest that
the police have no place in a trauma recovery center, she admits that she does not challenge law
enforcement directly. Her critiques, rather, only emerge when talking with other CHF members.
She and her colleagues talk about their frustrations, Josie tells me, but feel limited in what they
can do. As a staff member, Josie has mastered the ability to compartmentalize her professional and
activist logics. She is agentically aware, and highly critical, of this compartmentalization strategy,
but nonetheless uses it, having learned it from her own supervisors.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
As volunteers move through CHF’s training sequence, they learn to distinguish between
and tactfully deploy their multiple logics. When they first enter the organization, largely because
of CHF’s targeted recruitment strategies, they are activist identified. Volunteers join CHF to create
social change. The issues they identify largely stem from state systems they perceive to be unjust,
including the police and courts. As they move through the organization, though, they increasingly
espouse a professional logic. This logic suggests that, rather than viewing the state as an enemy,
volunteers should instead think of the police and courts as partners in the fight against gender-
based violence. With this shift in logic identification comes a shift both in the desired goal and in
the mechanisms used to achieve it. Adherents to an activist logic see structural change as the goal.
Volunteers want to change police and court treatment of victims of violence, and to shift social
systems that allow men’s violence against women to happen in the first place. Adherents to a
professional logic, on the other hand, see helping individual victims of violence as their goal, and
think of the state as a useful partner in supporting their mission.
By recruiting intentionally using an activist logic, CHF ensures a steady flow of volunteers.
Incensed by rightward shifts in U.S. politics, many individuals sympathetic to feminist causes are
132

looking to join organizations that seem, at face value, to be working to combat what they see as
systemic backwardness. CHF also ensures that volunteers share an institutional logic, which
prevents against internal conflict. Scholars document the conflicts that emerge when individual
carrying competing institutional logics try to work together in the same organization. In a domestic
violence agency in Israel, for example, volunteers sympathetic to an activist logic competed with
adherents to a more therapeutic logic because each logic prescribes both different goals and
different vocabularies of motive (Zilber 2002). To combat potential contention, scholars suggest
that organizations recruit individuals who share similar institutional logics, either through their
education or previous employment experience (Battilana and Dorado 2010). CHF follows this
organizational strategy closely, recruiting people who largely agree with one another.
Although adhering to the activist logic early on increases enrollment and cohesion, it does
not fully align with CHF’s actual work. Rather than directly challenging the state and law
enforcement to shift practices and policies to better serve victims of violence, CHF staff and
volunteers must collaborate diplomatically with their organizational partners. This strategic
requirement comes both from shifts in field-level institutions, which have become more
professionalized since the 1980s (Markowitz and Tice 2002; Messner et al. 2015), and from
funding pressures. Since most of the organization’s funding comes from city and state contracts,
they must maintain a positive working relationship with the government and its agents. Actual
volunteer work in the field, too, requires close collaboration between CHF representatives and
organizational partners. Intervention volunteers, for example, work alongside law enforcement to
respond to domestic and sexual violence victims. Prevention volunteers sometimes give
presentations on violence prevention to law enforcement, which requires a friendly, collegial tone.
133

They also enter public middle and high schools. These presentations must feel productive and
friendly to all organizational partners lest site access be revoked.
At first glance, the data might appear to fit closely with socialization theories of individual
interaction with institutional logics. Through education, a key socialization process, volunteers
deidentified with the activist logic while simultaneously forming new attachments to the
professional logic. As evidenced through ethnographic excerpts and interviews both from
volunteers and staff, though, many participants retain their commitment to an activist logic while
interacting only with other CHF members. Recall Jade, who critiques law enforcement when with
CHF members but engages happily in small talk when talking to individual police officers. This
strategy, wherein volunteers adopt professional identifications when working with partners and
activist identifications intra-organizationally, aligns closely with theories of individual agency,
which suggest that people develop creative responses to institutional complexity. Specifically,
CHF members here describe “compartmentalizing” their logic, a practice which allows them to
switch between the two logics depending on their location.
The individual agency theory largely explores the strategies of established experts at a
given point in time. As a result, the strategies employed are conceptualized as the result of experts’
own innate creativity and political cunning. My data show that volunteers do not naturally know
how to compartmentalize their activist and professional logics into different parts of their lives;
instead, CHF staff teach them strategies for managing this complexity. CHF staff model their own
strategies, telling volunteers that they too used to struggle maintaining their activist identifications
while inside the organization. Through time, though, they learned the importance of working with
law enforcement. Staff also explicitly tell volunteers that their own identifications are different
outside of the organization; while inside, though, they maintain their professional identification.
134

In addition to modeling, CHF staff bring volunteers onboard, sharing why a professional logic is
important for the organization’s success. By telling volunteers that CHF could not do its work
without the help of the police, staff convince volunteers of the importance of a professional logic.
To explain my data, then, I combine elements of both the socialization and agency theories.
Through education, volunteers learn strategies for managing institutional complexity. This insight
contributes to institutional analysis, showing that individuals are neither passive recipients of
existing logics, nor are they fully independent and creative manipulators of logics. Rather,
individuals learn creative strategies, namely compartmentalization, for managing competing logics
through socialization processes. The creative strategies used by organization members are
themselves patterned. Future research might explore how these patterned strategies differ across
contexts. Compartmentalization may be a common strategy in the U.S. nonprofit sector, for
example, but may not translate into other national contexts.

135

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER
This dissertation explores barriers nonprofit staff and volunteers confront when providing
social services to victims of gender-based violence. While gender-based violence has long been
an empirical phenomenon (the Bible, for example, provides numerous examples of physical
violence against wives, see Kroeger and Beck 1996), sexual and domestic violence were not
defined as social problems until the 1960s. Early activists founded informal grassroots feminist
organizations to respond to victims of gender-based violence, which were later incorporated as
formal nonprofits and professionalized. Today, nonprofit organizations – primarily rape crisis
centers and domestic violence shelters – still serve as a primary response to victims of gender-
based violence. My dissertation explores features of these nonprofit organizations that stymie
workers’ capacity for preventing and responding to gender-based violence.
An extensive body of research examines the anti-gender-based violence field. Much of it
focuses on criminal-legal responses to rape and domestic violence. While important, this
substantive focus does not capture the full breadth of victim experiences because only about ten
percent of victims ever report to the police. I extend the literature substantively here by studying a
nonprofit organization tasked with providing services directly to victims. I also complement
existing literature on anti-gender-based violence nonprofit organizations by providing an
organizational, rather than cultural or institutional, analysis. Most studies on rape crisis centers
study the meaning attached to violence by workers. Scholars are interested largely in the political
rhetoric espoused by workers. Moving beyond a focus on meaning, the papers in this dissertation
explore the day-to-day challenges workers confront when providing services.
While most directly relevant to literature on gender-based violence, my findings extend
also to literature on social welfare more broadly. Care of victims of gender-based violence is just
136

one example of a service activists demand the state provide for citizens. In the course of U.S.
history, activists have expanded state responsibility to include Social Security, education and
healthcare for children, financial support for the unemployed and disabled, and medical care for
military veterans. Now, the state too, because of activist intervention, is responsible for providing
care for victims of gender-based violence. Since the 1980s, many social welfare services have been
contracted out to the nonprofit sector. Rather than giving welfare to citizens directly, the state pays
nonprofits to provide services on its behalf. Most scholarship on this new arrangement focuses on
its structural contours – the size and shape of the new welfare regime. Some street-level work does
explore tensions, like mission drift, that emerge when nonprofit workers and representatives of the
state rub shoulders. I build on this work by focusing explicitly on how the organizational
conditions produced by a hybrid welfare regime inhibit nonprofit missions on the ground.
EMPIRICAL USEFULNESS
Each of the papers included in this dissertation tackle a different empirical problem. Results
identify the organizational foundations of inadequate service provision. By focusing explicitly on
organizational conditions, I introduce the potential for substantive reforms. While changing culture
might be difficult, changing the ordering of information on an intake form is relatively simple.
The first paper, “Manufacturing Volunteer Embeddedness in an Anti-Gender-Based
Violence Organization,” tackles the problem of volunteer and staff turnover. When organization
members quit, they take with them valuable knowledge and skills. This paper shows how
institutional logics are strategically deployed by staff members to encourage volunteer recruitment
and retention. When inconsistencies in logics emerge, however, volunteers become disenchanted
and end up leaving the organization. Practically, this paper demonstrates the importance of
coupling organization missions closely with the day-to-day practice of volunteers.
137

The second paper, “Rhetorical and Organizational Typification of Domestic Violence,
Sexual Assault, and Stalking as Discrete Forms of Violence,” explains why nonprofit members
treat three forms of gender-based violence as discrete despite knowledge of their co-occurrence. I
show that volunteer training schedules and organizational paperwork present each form of violence
as independent of the others. This misleading presentation of violence ill-prepares volunteers for
treating victims as they actually appear in the social world.
The third paper, “How Organizational Architecture Stymies Criminal Justice Reform:
Evidence from an Anti-Gender-Based Violence Organization,” shows how the nonprofit’s
physical space, personnel, and paperwork limit its ability to provide alternatives-to-incarceration.
Despite nonprofit workers’ knowledge that most perpetrators of violence are themselves victims,
staff members are limited by static organizational features in their capacity to serve these victims.
Instead, they funnel these victims towards the criminal justice system. This paper both defines
perpetrators as a hard to reach victim population and identifies barriers to treating them.
Lastly, the fourth paper, “When you’re here, you’re not a militant feminist”: Managing
Institutional Complexity in an Anti-Gender-Based Violence Organization,” tracks how nonprofit
workers manage disagreements between inter-organizational partners. Staff members train
volunteers on how to interact with law enforcement, minimizing their activist orientations in favor
of a professional one. Most practically, this paper shows how state agendas organizationally
supplant those of nonprofit volunteers.
THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS
In addition to answering empirical questions around service provision, each paper also
contributes to ongoing theoretical conversations in sociology, criminology, and management. I
show how typification, a process long thought to be a rhetorical phenomenon by social problems
138

scholars, is also an organizational phenomenon. I expand institutional theory, demonstrating how
strategies for managing complexity are learned. I push theories of punishment to consider how
physical spaces shape policy beyond the individual political and cultural orientations of key
stakeholders.
Taken collectively, however, these papers tell a bigger theoretical story. Research on the
anti-gender-based violence movement and research on social welfare in the U.S. are alike in the
focus on the structural contours of their fields (Bumiller 2010; Clemens and Guthrie 2010; Richie
2012; Salamon et al. 2013). In the anti-gender-based violence context, scholars are interested in
the cultural claims made by leaders of the movement and shifting relationships between activists
and the state (Messner, Greenberg, and Peretz 2015; Markowitz and Tice 2002). Scholars of social
welfare are primarily interested in how much money goes towards which kinds of services, and in
who gets the money and provides services (Allard 2017; INCITE 2007; Salamon et al. 2013). In
both bodies of literature, some scholars track the action of street-level workers on the ground
(Greenberg 2019; Hays 2004). This research is important in showing how the people who actually
enact policy manage their clients (Lipsky 1980). The four papers build on this work by identifying
organizational conditions – the static features of organizations, like personnel, architecture,
paperwork, and physical spaces – as an intermediary between larger structures and the work of
individuals on the ground. Street-level workers rarely interact with “the state” or “the market” –
rather, they interact with the organization features established by social structures. The physical
buildings, staffing requirements, and forms mandated by social structures are what street-level
workers see and touch on a day-to-day basis. Thus, in this dissertation, I demonstrate how
organizational conditions, related to but independent from broader social structures, act as the
Rosetta stone by which social structure shapes worker action on the ground.
139

REFERENCES
Addams, Jane. (1911). Twenty Years at Hull House: With autobiographical notes. MacMillan.
Adler, Patricia A., and Peter Adler. 2008. “OF RHETORIC AND REPRESENTATION: The
Four Faces of Ethnography.” The Sociological Quarterly 49(1):1–30.
Aizer, Anna. 2010. “The Gender Wage Gap and Domestic Violence.” American Economic
Review 100(4):1847–59.
Alexander, Michelle. 2012. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness. New York: The New Press.
Allen, David G. 2006. “Do Organizational Socialization Tactics Influence Newcomer
Embeddedness and Turnover?” Journal of Management 32(2):237–56.
Allen, David G., Phillip C. Bryant, and James M. Vardaman. 2010. “Retaining Talent: Replacing
Misconceptions with Evidence-Based Strategies.” The Academy of Management
Perspectives 24(2):48–64.
Almandoz, Juan. 2014. “Founding Teams as Carriers of Competing Logics: When Institutional
Forces Predict Banks’ Risk Exposure.” Administrative Science Quarterly.
Amir, Menachem. 1971. Patterns in Forcible Rape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ampofo, Emmanuel Twumasi, Alan Coetzer, and Paul Poisat. 2017. “Relationships between Job
Embeddedness and Employees’ Life Satisfaction.” Employee Relations 39(7):951–66.
Anderson, Irina. 2007. “What Is a Typical Rape? Effects of Victim and Participant Gender in
140

Female and Male Rape Perception.” The British Journal of Social Psychology 46(Pt
1):225–45.
Anteby, Michel, and Amy Wrzesniewski. 2014. “In Search of the Self at Work: Young Adults’
Experiences of a Dual Identity Organization.” Research in the Sociology of Work 25:13–
50.
Armstrong, Elizabeth A., Miriam Gleckman-Krut, and Lanora Johnson. 2018. “Silence, Power,
and Inequality: An Intersectional Approach to Sexual Violence.” Annual Review of
Sociology 44(1):99–122.
Arnold, Gretchen, and Jami Ake. 2013. “Reframing the Narrative of the Battered Women’s
Movement:” Violence Against Women.
Bagwell-Gray, Meredith E., Jill Theresa Messing, and Adrienne Baldwin-White. 2015. “Intimate
Partner Sexual Violence: A Review of Terms, Definitions, and Prevalence.” Trauma,
Violence, & Abuse 16(3):316–35.
Bambacas, Mary, and T. Carol Kulik. 2013. “Job Embeddedness in China: How HR Practices
Impact Turnover Intentions.” The International Journal of Human Resource Management
24(10):1933–52.
Barman, Emily. 2016. “Varieties of Field Theory and the Sociology of the Non-Profit Sector.”
Sociology Compass 10(6):442–58.
Battilana, Julie, and Silvia Dorado. 2010. “Building Sustainable Hybrid Organizations: The Case
141

of Commercial Microfinance Organizations.” The Academy of Management Journal
53(6):1419–40.
Beaudry, Madeleine. 1985. Battered women. Black Rose Books.
Beckett K and Murakawa N (2012) Mapping the shadow carceral state: Toward an institutionally
capacious approach to punishment. Theoretical Criminology 16(2): 221–244. DOI:
10.1177/1362480612442113.
Beckett K, Reosti A and Knaphus E (2016) The End of an Era? Understanding the
Contradictions of Criminal Justice Reform. The ANNALS of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 664(1): 238–259. DOI: 10.1177/0002716215598973.
Ben-David, Sarah and Ofra Schneider. 2005. “Rape Perceptions, Gender Role Attitudes, and
Victim-Perpetrator Acquaintance.” Sex Roles 53(5):385–99.
Bergen, Raquel Kennedy and Paul Bukovec. 2006. “Men and Intimate Partner Rape:
Characteristics of Men Who Sexually Abuse Their Partner.” Journal of Interpersonal
Violence 21(10):1375–84.
Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. 2011. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in
the Sociology of Knowledge. Open Road Media.
Berns, Nancy. 2004. Framing the Victim: Domestic Violence, Media, and Social Problems.
Transaction Publishers.
Best, Joel. 2016. Social Problems. Third edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
142

Bevacqua, Maria. 2000. Rape on the Public Agenda: Feminism and the Politics of Sexual
Assault. UPNE.
Bevan E and Higgins DJ (2002) Is Domestic Violence Learned? The Contribution of Five Forms
of Child Maltreatment to Men’s Violence and Adjustment. Journal of Family Violence
17(3): 223–245. DOI: 10.1023/A:1016053228021.
Bidee, J., T. Vantilborgh, R. Pepermans, G. Huybrechts, J. Willems, M. Jegers, and J. Hofmans.
2013. “Autonomous Motivation Stimulates Volunteers’ Work Effort: A Self-
Determination Theory Approach to Volunteerism.” Voluntas: International Journal of
Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 24(1):32–47.
Biden, Joseph R. 1993. “Violence against Women: The Congressional Response.” American
Psychologist 48(10):1059–61.
Binder, Amy. 2007. “For Love and Money: Organizations’ Creative Responses to Multiple
Environmental Logics.” Theory and Society 36(6):547–71.
Bjerregaard, Toke, and Charlotte Jonasson. 2014. “Managing Unstable Institutional
Contradictions: The Work of Becoming:” Organization Studies.
Bjerregaard, Toke, and Jakob Lauring. 2012. “Entrepreneurship as Institutional Change:
Strategies of Bridging Institutional Contradictions.” European Management Review
9(1):31–43.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press.
143

Breaugh, James A., and Mary Starke. 2000. “Research on Employee Recruitment: So Many
Studies, so Many Remaining Questions.” Journal of Management 26(3):405–34.
Breiding, Matthew J., Sharon G. Smith, Kathleen C. Basile, Mikel L. Walters, Jieru Chen, and
Melissa T. Merrick. 2014. “Prevalence and Characteristics of Sexual Violence, Stalking,
and Intimate Partner Violence Victimization--National Intimate Partner and Sexual
Violence Survey, United States, 2011.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Surveillance Summaries (Washington, D.C.: 2002) 63(8):1–18.
Brodkin, Evelyn Z. 2007. “Bureaucracy Redux: Management Reformism and the Welfare State.”
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 17(1):1–17.
Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. Open Road Media.
Brudney, Jeffrey L., and Lucas C. P. M. Meijs. 2009. “It Ain’t Natural: Toward a New (Natural)
Resource Conceptualization for Volunteer Management.” Nonprofit and Voluntary
Sector Quarterly.
Brudney, Jeffrey L., and Lucas C. P. M. Meijs. 2014. “Models of Volunteer Management:
Professional Volunteer Program Management in Social Work.” Human Service
Organizations: Management, Leadership & Governance 38(3):297–309.
Bumiller, Kristin. 2008. In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist
Movement against Sexual Violence. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
Bumiller, Kristin. 2010. “The Nexus of Domestic Violence Reform and Social Science: From
144

Instrument of Social Change to Institutionalized Surveillance.” Annual Review of Law
and Social Science 6(1):173–93.
Burawoy, Michael. 2016. “The Extended Case Method*:” Sociological Theory.
Cabral, Raquel R., and Timothy B. Smith. 2011. “Racial/Ethnic Matching of Clients and
Therapists in Mental Health Services: A Meta-Analytic Review of Preferences,
Perceptions, and Outcomes.” Journal of Counseling Psychology 58(4):537–54.
Campbell, Jacquelyn and Karen Soeken. 1999. “Forced Sex and Intimate Partner Violence:
Effects on Women’s Risk and Women’s Health.” Violence Against Women 5(9):1017–
35.
Charmaz, Kathy. 2014. Constructing Grounded Theory. Second edition. London ; Thousand
Oaks, Calif: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Clemens, Elisabeth S., and Doug Guthrie. 2010. Politics and Partnerships: The Role of Voluntary
Associations in America’s Political Past and Present. University of Chicago Press.
Christie, Nils. 1986. “The Ideal Victim.” In Fattah EA (ed.) From Crime Policy to Victim Policy:
Reorienting the Justice System. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 17–30. DOI:
10.1007/978-1-349-08305-3_2.
Cox, Joe, Eun Young Oh, Brooke Simmons, Gary Graham, Anita Greenhill, Chris Lintott, Karen
Masters, and James Woodcock. 2015. Doing Good Online: An Investigation into the
Characteristics and Motivations of Digital Volunteers. SSRN Scholarly Paper. ID
145

2717402. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network.
Dagan, David, and Steven M. Teles. 2014. “Locked In? Conservative Reform and the Future of
Mass Incarceration.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 651(1):266–76.
Davis, Liane V. and Bonnie E. Carlson. 2016. “Observation of Spouse Abuse: What Happens to
the Children?” Journal of Interpersonal Violence.
De Vita, Carol J., and Eric C. Twombly. 2006. Nonprofits and Federalism. In Nonprofits and
Government: Collaboration and Conflict, edited by Elizabeth T. Boris and C. Eugene
Steuerle, 257– 76.Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press.
DiMaggio, Paul J., and Walter W. Powell. 1983. “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional
Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” American
Sociological Review 48(2):147–60.
Dimitriadis, Stefan, Matthew Lee, Lakshmi Ramarajan, and Julie Battilana. 2017. “Blurring the
Boundaries: The Interplay of Gender and Local Communities in the Commercialization
of Social Ventures.” Organization Science 28(5):819–39.
Dobash, R. Emerson and Russel Dobash. 1979. Violence against Wives: A Case against the
Patriarchy. New York: The Free Press.
Du Mont, Janice, Karen-Lee Miller, and Terri L. Myhr. 2003. “The Role of ‘Real Rape’ and
146

‘Real Victim’ Stereotypes in the Police Reporting Practices of Sexually Assaulted
Women.” Violence Against Women 9(4):466–86.
Echols, Alice. 1989. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975. U of
Minnesota Press.
Eliasoph, Nina. 2011. Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare’s End. Princeton University
Press.
Emerson, Charles D. 1979. “Family violence: a study by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s
Department.” Police Chief 46(6):48-50.
Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 2011. Writing Ethnographic
Fieldnotes, Second Edition. Second edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Englert, Benedikt, Julia Thaler, and Bernd Helmig. 2019. “Fit Themes in Volunteering: How Do
Volunteers Perceive Person–Environment Fit?” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector
Quarterly 0899764019872005.
Epstein, Steven. 1996. Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge.
University of California Press.
Fabricant, Robert Fisher Michael B. 2002. Settlement Houses Under Siege: The Struggle to
Sustain Community Organizations in New York City: 1st (First) Edition. Columbia
University Press.
147

Feeley MM and Kamin S. 1996. “The Effect of'Three Strikes and You're Out' on the Courts:
Looking Back to See the Future," in Shichor, D., & D. K. Sechrest, eds., Three Strikes
and You're Out: Vengeance as Public Policy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 135-54
Feldman, Daniel C., and Thomas W. H. Ng. 2007. “Careers: Mobility, Embeddedness, and
Success.” Journal of Management 33(3):350–77.
Fink, Joshua J., and David Brady. 2020. “Immigration and Preferences for Greater Law
Enforcement Spending in Rich Democracies.” Social Forces 98(3):1074–1111.
Fiol, C. Marlene, Michael G. Pratt, and Edward J. O’Connor. 2009. “Managing Intractable
Identity Conflicts.” Academy of Management Review 34(1):32–55.
Ford, Kristin. 2018. “The Influence of Perpetrator-Victim Relationship and Training on Police
Perceptions of Stalking.” ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
Franko Aas, Katja, and Mary Bosworth. 2013. The Borders of Punishment: Migration,
Citizenship, and Social Exclusion. 1 edition. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford
University Press.
Freedman, Estelle B. 2013. Redefining Rape. Harvard University Press.
Fried, Amy. 2016. “‘It’s hard to change what we want to change’: Rape Crisis Centers as
Organizations.” Gender & Society.
Garland, David. 2001. Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences. SAGE.
148

Garland, David. 2012. The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Garland, David. 2013. “Penality and the Penal State.” Criminology 51(3):475–517.
Garner, Johny T., and Lindsey T. Garner. 2010. “Volunteering and Opinion: Organizational
Voice and Volunteer Retention in Nonprofit Organizations. Nonprofit and Voluntary
Sector Quarterly. Advance Online Publication. Doi:10.1177/0899764010366181.”
European Sociological Review 617–632.
Garner, Joel H. and Christopher D. Maxwell. 2008. “Coordinated Community Responses to
Intimate Partner Violence in the 20th and 21st Centuries.” Criminology & Public Policy 7
(4): 525–35. doi:10.1111/j.1745-9133.2008.00525.x.
Gelles, Richard J. 1974. The Violent Home: A Study of Physical Aggression Between Husbands
and Wives. Beverly Hills, Calif: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Gerbrandij, Jacomina, Barry Rosenfeld, Alicia Nijdam-Jones, and Michele Galietta. 2018.
“Evaluating Risk Assessment Instruments for Intimate Partner Stalking and Intimate
Partner Violence.” Journal of Threat Assessment and Management 5(2):103–18.
Ghosh, Piyali, Rachita Satyawadi, Jagdamba Prasad Joshi, and Mohd. Shadman. 2013. “Who
Stays with You? Factors Predicting Employees’ Intention to Stay” edited by P. Stokes.
International Journal of Organizational Analysis 21(3):288–312.
149

Glasser, M., I. Kolvin, D. Campbell, A. Glasser, I. Leitch, and S. Farrelly. 2001. “Cycle of Child
Sexual Abuse: Links between Being a Victim and Becoming a Perpetrator.” The British
Journal of Psychiatry 179(6):482–94.
Gong, Neil. 2019. “Between Tolerant Containment and Concerted Constraint: Managing
Madness for the City and the Privileged Family.” American Sociological Review
84(4):664–89.
Goodman‐Delahunty, Jane and Kelly Graham. 2011. “The Influence of Victim Intoxication and
Victim Attire on Police Responses to Sexual Assault.” Journal of Investigative
Psychology and Offender Profiling 8(1):22–40.
Gracia, Enrique. 2014. “Intimate Partner Violence against Women and Victim-Blaming
Attitudes among Europeans.” Bulletin of the World Health Organisation 92:380–81.
Green, Ben, Thibaut Horel, and Andrew V. Papachristos. 2017. “Modeling Contagion Through
Social Networks to Explain and Predict Gunshot Violence in Chicago, 2006 to 2014.”
JAMA Internal Medicine 177(3):326–33.
Greenberg, Jason, and Ethan Mollick. 2017. “Activist Choice Homophily and the Crowdfunding
of Female Founders.” Administrative Science Quarterly 62(2):341–74.
Greenberg, Max A. 2019. Twelve Weeks to Change a Life: At-Risk Youth in a Fractured State
(First edition). Oakland, California: University of California Press.
150

Greenwood, Royston, Christine Oliver, Thomas Lawrence, and Renate Meyer. 2017. The SAGE
Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. 55 City Road, London.
Griffin, Susan. 1971. Rape: The All-American Crime. Women Against Rape.
Gottschalk, Marie. 2016. Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics.
Revised edition. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Grønbjerg, Kirsten A. 2001. “The U.S. Nonprofit Human Service Sector: A Creeping
Revolution.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 30(2):276–97.
Grønbjerg, Kirsten A., and Lester M. Salamon. 2002. “Devolution, Marketization, and the
Changing Shape of Government-Nonprofit Relations.” 447–70 in The State of Nonprofit
America, edited by Lester M. Salamon. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Gusfield, Joseph R. 1984. The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic
Order. University of Chicago Press.
Hachen, David S. 1992. “Industrial Characteristics and Job Mobility Rates.” American
Sociological Review 57(1):39–55.
Hager, Mark A., and Jeffrey L. Brudney. 2011. “Problems Recruiting Volunteers: Nature versus
Nurture.” Nonprofit Management and Leadership 22(2):137–57.
Hallett, Tim, and Marc J. Ventresca. 2006. “Inhabited Institutions: Social Interactions and
Organizational Forms in Gouldner’s ‘Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy.’” Theory and
151

Society 35(2):213–36.
Hammida, Mustapha. 2004. “Job Mobility and Hourly Wages: Is There a Relationship?”
Monthly Labor Review 127(5):23–31.
Haney, Lynne. 2010. Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire. First
edition. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, Mary R. 1985. Exemplary Rape Crisis Programs: A Cross-Site Analysis and Case
Studies. Rockville, MD, US: National Institute of Mental Health.
Hasenfeld, Yeheskel. 2000. “Organizational Forms as Moral Practices: The Case of Welfare
Departments.” Social Service Review 74 (3): 329–51.
Hasenfeld, Yeheskel. 2009. Human Services as Complex Organizations. SAGE Publications.
Hasenfeld, Yeheskel, and Eve E. Garrow. 2012. “Nonprofit Human-Service Organizations,
Social Rights, and Advocacy in a Neoliberal Welfare State.” Social Service Review
86(2):295–322.
Hays, Sharon. 2004. Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform. 9/14/04
edition. Oxford ; Oxford University Press.
Henriksen, Lars Skov, Steven Rathgeb Smith, and Annette Zimmer. 2015. “Welfare Mix and
Hybridity. Flexible Adjustments to Changed Environments. Introduction to the Special
152

Issue.” VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations
26(5):1591–1600.
Herring, Chris. 2019. “Complaint-Oriented Policing: Regulating Homelessness in Public Space.”
American Sociological Review 84(5):769–800.
Hockett, Jericho M., Donald A. Saucier, and Caitlyn Badke. 2016. “Rape Myths, Rape Scripts,
and Common Rape Experiences of College Women: Differences in Perceptions of
Women Who Have Been Raped.” Violence Against Women 22(3):307–23.
Holtom, Brooks C., and Bonnie S. O’Neill. 2004. “Job Embeddedness: A Theoretical Foundation
for Developing a Comprehensive Nurse Retention Plan.” The Journal of Nursing
Administration 34(5):216–27.
Hoogervorst, Niek, Judith Metz, Lonneke Roza, and Eva van Baren. 2015. “How Perceptions of
Altruism and Sincerity Affect Client Trust in Volunteers Versus Paid Workers:”
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.
Hume, Kelly. 2018. “Evaluation of the Co-Occurrence of Domestic Violence and Sex Offending
Behaviors in Adult Males Currently Participating in Offense-Specific Treatment.”
ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
Ibarra, Peter and John Kitsuse. 2003. “Claimsmaking discourse and vernacular resources.” In J.
A Holstein, & G. Miller (Eds.), Challenges & choices (pp. 17-50). New York: Aldine de
153

Gruyter
INCITE! 2017. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.
Duke University Press.
Jacobson, Michael. 2006. Downsizing Prisons: How to Reduce Crime and End Mass
Incarceration. New York and London: NYU Press.
Jarzabkowski, Paula, Jane K. Lê, and Andrew H. Van de Ven. 2013. “Responding to Competing
Strategic Demands: How Organizing, Belonging, and Performing Paradoxes Coevolve:”
Strategic Organization.
Jensen, Kristine B., and Kim K. McKeage. 2015. “Fostering Volunteer Satisfaction: Enhancing
Collaboration Through Structure.” Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership 5(3).
Jiang, Kaifeng, Dong Liu, Patrick McKay, Thomas Lee, and Terence Mitchell. 2012. “When and
How Is Job Embeddedness Predictive of Turnover? A Meta-Analytic Investigation.” The
Journal of Applied Psychology 97:1077–96.
Johnson, Michael P. 2010. A Typology of Domestic Violence: Intimate Terrorism, Violent
Resistance, and Situational Couple Violence. Boston : Hanover, N.H.: Northeastern
University Press.
Katz, Jack. 2012. “Ethnography’s Expanding Warrants.” ANNALS of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 642(1):258–75.
154

Katz, Jackson. 2018. “Bystander Training as Leadership Training: Notes on the Origins,
Philosophy, and Pedagogy of the Mentors in Violence Prevention Model.” Violence
Against Women 24(15):1755–76.
Katz, Michael B. 1996. In the Shadow Of the Poorhouse: A Social History Of Welfare In
America, Tenth Anniversary Edition. Basic Books.
Kaukinen, Catherine. 2004. “The Help-Seeking Strategies of Female Violent-Crime Victims:
The Direct and Conditional Effects of Race and the Victim-Offender Relationship.”
Journal of Interpersonal Violence 19(9):967–90.
Kelly, R. and Ritz D. 2013. The Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me. Smiley Books.
Kelly, Liz and Nicole Westmarland. 2016. “Naming and Defining ‘Domestic Violence’: Lessons
from Research with Violent Men.” Feminist Review 112(1):113–27.
Kim, Kwang-ki and Tim Berard. 2009. “Typification in Society and Social Science: The
Continuing Relevance of Schutz’s Social Phenomenology.” Human Studies 32(3):263–
89.
Kitsuse, John I. and Malcolm Spector. 1975. “Social Problems and Deviance: Some Parallel
Issues.” Social Problems 22(5):584–94.
Kitsuse, John I. and Malcolm Spector. 2000. Constructing Social Problems. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers.
155

Kleinbaum, Adam M., Toby E. Stuart, and Michael L. Tushman. 2013. “Discretion within
Constraint: Homophily and Structure in a Formal Organization.” Organization Science
24(5):1316–36.
Kolb, Kenneth H. 2014. Moral Wages: The Emotional Dilemmas of Victim Advocacy and
Counseling. Univ of California Press.
Kraatz, M. S. and Block, E.S. 2008. “Organizational Implications of Institutional Pluralism.” Pp.
243–75 in The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. London: SAGE
Publications Ltd.
Kroeger, Catherine Clark, and James R. Beck, eds. 1996. Women, Abuse, and the Bible: How
Scripture Can Be Used to Hurt or to Heal. Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Pub Group.
Kwan, Samantha and Jennifer Graves. 2013. Framing Fat: Competing Constructions in
Contemporary Culture. Rutgers University Press.
LaFree, Gary. 1989. Rape and Criminal Justice: The Social Construction of Sexual Assault/ Gary
Lafree. Belmont (Calif.): Wadsworth Publishing Company.
Langenderfer-Magruder, Lisa, N. Eugene Walls, Shanna K. Kattari, Darren L. Whitfield, and
Daniel Ramos. 2016. “Sexual Victimization and Subsequent Police Reporting by Gender
Identity Among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Adults.” Violence and
Victims 31(2):320–31.
156

Lanier, Cynthia A. “Rape-Accepting Attitudes: Precursors to or Consequences of Forced Sex.”
Violence Against Women.
Lee, Thomas W., Terence R. Mitchell, Chris J. Sablynski, James P. Burton, and Brooks C.
Holtom. 2004. “The Effects of Job Embeddedness on Organizational Citizenship, Job
Performance, Volitional Absences, and Voluntary Turnover.” Academy of Management
Journal 47(5):711–22.
Levitt, Miriam, and Donald B. Rosenthal. 1999. “The Third Wave: A Symposium on Aids
Politics and Policy in the United States in the 1990s.” Policy Studies Journal 27(4):783–
95.
Lipsky, Michael. [1983] 2010. Street Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public
Services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Loseke, Donileen R. 1992. The Battered Woman and Shelters: The Social Construction of Wife
Abuse. SUNY Press.
Lowney, Kathleen S and Joel Best. 1995. “Stalking Strangers and Lovers: Changing Media
Typifications of a New Crime Problem.” In Images of Issues, edited by Joel Best. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Lynch, Mona. 2016. Hard Bargains: The Coercive Power of Drug Laws in Federal Court. 1
edition. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
157

Macy, Rebecca J., Mary Giattina, Tamara H. Sangster, Carmen Crosby, and Natalie Johns
Montijo. 2009. “Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Services: Inside the Black Box.”
Aggression and Violent Behavior 14(5):359–73.
Markowitz, Lisa and Karen W. Tice. 2002. “Paradoxes of Professionalization: Parallel Dilemmas
in Women’s Organizations in the Americas.” Gender & Society.
Martin, D. (1987). “The historical roots of domestic violence.” In D. J. Sonkin (Ed.), Domestic
violence on trial: Psychological and legal dimensions of family violence. New York:
Springer Publishing Company.
Martin, Patricia Yancey. 1990. “Rethinking Feminist Organizations.” Gender and Society
4(2):182–206.
Martin, Patricia Yancey. 2005. Rape Work : Victims, Gender, and Emotions in Organization and
Community Context. Routledge.
Matek, Ord. 1980. “Teaching Volunteers of a Crisis Phone Service to Respond Therapeutically
To Callers With Sex Problems.” Journal of Sex Education and Therapy 6(2):24–28.
Matthews, Nancy A. 1994. Confronting Rape: The Feminist Anti-Rape Movement and the State.
Routledge.
Mayr, Marcel Lee. 2017. “Transformational Leadership and Volunteer Firefighter Engagement.”
Nonprofit Management and Leadership 28(2):259–70.
158

McCarthy, Kathleen D. D. 2005. American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil Society,
1700-1865. Paperback Ed edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McElroy, J. C., P. C. Morrow, and S. N. Rude. 2001. “Turnover and Organizational
Performance: A Comparative Analysis of the Effects of Voluntary, Involuntary, and
Reduction-in-Force Turnover.” The Journal of Applied Psychology 86(6):1294–99.
McPherson, Chad Michael, and Michael Sauder. 2013. “Logics in Action: Managing
Institutional Complexity in a Drug Court.” Administrative Science Quarterly.
McPherson, Miller, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook. 2001. “Birds of a Feather:
Homophily in Social Networks.” Annual Review of Sociology 27(1):415–44.
Mesch, Debra J., Patrick M. Rooney, Kathryn S. Steinberg, and Brian Denton. 2016. “The
Effects of Race, Gender, and Marital Status on Giving and Volunteering in Indiana:”
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.
Messner, Michael A. 2016. “Bad Men, Good Men, Bystanders: Who Is the Rapist?” Gender &
Society 30(1):57–66.
Messner, Michael A., Max A. Greenberg, and Tal Peretz. 2015. Some Men. 1 edition. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Meyer, John W., and Brian Rowan. 1977. “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as
Myth and Ceremony.” American Journal of Sociology 83(2):340–63.
159

Meyer, Silke. 2016. “Still Blaming the Victim of Intimate Partner Violence? Women’s
Narratives of Victim Desistance and Redemption When Seeking Support.” Theoretical
Criminology 20(1):75–90.
Milbourn, Ben, Melissa H. Black, and Angus Buchanan. 2019. “Why People Leave Community
Service Organizations: A Mixed Methods Study.” VOLUNTAS: International Journal of
Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 30(1):272–81.
Milward, H. Brinton, and Keith G. Provan. 2000. “Governing the Hollow State.” Journal of
Policy Administration Research and Theory 10 (2): 359–79.
Mitchell, Terence R., Brooks C. Holtom, Thomas W. Lee, Chris J. Sablynski, and Miriam Erez.
2001. “Why People Stay: Using Job Embeddedness to Predict Voluntary Turnover.”
Academy of Management Journal 44(6):1102–21.
Mohr, John W., and Francesca Guerra-Pearson. 2010. “The Duality of Niche and Form: The
Differentiation of Institutional Space in New York City, 1888–1917.” 321–68 in
Categories in Markets: Origins and Evolution, edited by Greta Hsu, Giacomo Negro, and
O¨ zgecan Koc¸ak. Vol. 31 in Research in the Sociology of Organizations. Bingley:
Emerald Group.
Morning Consult (2016) National Tracking Poll 160812. 10.
Mouilso, Emily R., and Karen S. Calhoun. 2013. “The Role of Rape Myth Acceptance and
160

Psychopathy in Sexual Assault Perpetration.” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment &
Trauma 22(2):159–74.
Moylan, Carrie A., and Taryn Lindhorst. 2015. “‘Catching Flies With Honey’: The Management
of Conflict in Sexual Assault Response Teams.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence
30(11):1945–64.
Murakawa, Naomi. 2014. The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. 1 edition.
Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Musick, Marc A., and John Wilson. 2007. Volunteers: A Social Profile. Indiana University Press.
Musick, Marc A., John Wilson, and William B. Bynum. 2000. “Race and Formal Volunteering:
The Differential Effects of Class and Religion.” Social Forces 78(4):1539–70.
O’Sullivan, Elizabeth Ann and Abigail Carlton. 2001. “Victim Services, Community Outreach,
and Contemporary Rape Crisis Centers: A Comparison of Independent and Multiservice
Centers.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 16(4):343–60.
Oostlander, Jeannette, Stefan T. Güntert, Susan van Schie, and Theo Wehner. 2013. “Leadership
and Volunteer Motivation: A Study Using Self-Determination Theory.” Nonprofit and
Voluntary Sector Quarterly.
Pache, Anne-Claire, and Filipe Santos. 2010. “When Worlds Collide: The Internal Dynamics of
Organizational Responses to Conflicting Institutional Demands.” Academy of
161

Management Review 35(3):455–76.
Pache, Anne-Claire, and Filipe Santos. 2013. “Embedded in Hybrid Contexts: How Individuals
in Organizations Respond to Competing Institutional Logics.” Pp. 3–35 in Institutional
Logics in Action, Part B. Vol. 39 Part B, Research in the Sociology of Organizations,
edited by M. Lounsbury and E. Boxenbaum. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Page, Joshua. 2011. “Prison Officer Unions and the Perpetuation of the Penal Status Quo.”
Criminology & Public Policy 10(3):735–70.
Pager, Devah. 2003. “The Mark of a Criminal Record.” American Journal of Sociology.
108:937–75.
Parnas, Raymond. 1972. “The police response to the domestic disturbance.” In The Criminal in
the Arms of the Law, edited by Leon Radzinowicz and Marvin E. Wolfgang. New York;
Basic Books.
Paull, Megan. 2002. “Reframing Volunteer Management: A View From The West.” ECU
Publications 7.
Peterson, Cora, Megan C. Kearns, Wendy LiKamWa McIntosh, Lianne Fuino Estefan, Christina
Nicolaidis, Kathryn E. McCollister, Amy Gordon, and Curtis Florence. 2018. “Lifetime
Economic Burden of Intimate Partner Violence Among U.S. Adults.” American Journal
of Preventive Medicine 55(4):433–44.
162

Pfaff, John. 2017. Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration-and How to Achieve Real
Reform. Basic Books.
Pfohl, Stephen J. 1977. “The ‘Discovery’ of Child Abuse.” Social Problems 24(3):310–23.
Pizzey, Erin. 1977. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear. Harmondsworth ; New York:
Penguin.
Prasad, Monica. 2006. The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies
in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Randall, Melanie. 2004. Domestic Violence and the Construction of Ideal Victims: Assaulted
Women’s Image Problems in Law Deconstructing the Image of Battered Woman. Saint
Louis University Public Law Review (1): 107–154.
Rao, Hayagreeva, Philippe Monin, and Rodolphe Durand. 2003. “Institutional Change in Toque
Ville: Nouvelle Cuisine as an Identity Movement in French Gastronomy.” American
Journal of Sociology 108(4):795–843.
Raphael, Steven and Michael A. Stoll. 2009. Do Prisons Make Us Safer?: The Benefits and
Costs of the Prison Boom. Russell Sage Foundation.
Reay, Trish, Elizabeth Goodrick, Susanne Boch Waldorff, and Ann Casebeer. 2016. “Getting
Leopards to Change Their Spots: Co-Creating a New Professional Role Identity.”
163

Academy of Management Journal 60(3):1043–70.
Richie, Beth E. 2012. Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation.
5/26/12 edition. New York: NYU Press.
Roberts, Andrea L., Stephen E. Gilman, Garrett Fitzmaurice, Michele R. Decker, and Karestan
C. Koenen. 2010. “Witness of Intimate Partner Violence in Childhood and Perpetration
of Intimate Partner Violence in Adulthood.” Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.)
21(6):809–18.
Ross, Joann. 2015. “Making Marital Rape Visible: A History of American Legal and Social
Movements Criminalizing Rape in Marriage.” Dissertations, Theses, & Student Research,
Department of History.
Ross, Jody M., Michelle Drouin, and Katrina Coupe. 2019. “Sexting Coercion as a Component
of Intimate Partner Polyvictimization.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 34(11):2269–
91.
Roy, Maria. 1977. Battered Women: A Psychosociological Study of Domestic Violence. First
Edition edition. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Rubin, Ashley, and Michelle S. Phelps. 2017. “Fracturing the Penal State: State Actors and the
Role of Conflict in Penal Change.” Theoretical Criminology 21(4):422–40.
Russell, Diana E. H. 1990. Rape in Marriage. Indiana University Press.
164

Salamon, Dr Lester M. 1995. Partners in Public Service: Government-Nonprofit Relations in the
Modern Welfare State. Baltimore, Md: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Saldaña, Johnny. 2015. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers Third Edition. 3rd
edition. Los Angeles ; London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Schmitt, Frederika E. and Patricia Yancey Martin. 2007. “The History of the Anti-Rape and
Rape Crisis Center Movements.” In Encyclopedia of Interpersonal Violence, edited by
Renzetti, Claire M. and Jeffrey L. Edleson. Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE Publications,
Inc.
Schmitt, Frederika E., and Patricia Yancey Martin. 2016. “Unobtrusive Mobilization by an
institutionalized Rape Crisis Center: ‘All We Do Comes from Victims.’” Gender &
Society.
Schoenfeld, Heather. 2012. “Evidence-Based Policy and the Politics of Criminal Justice
Reform.” Criminology & Public Policy 11(2):379–82.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. 2010. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Routledge.
Scott, Adrian J., Nikki Rajakaruna, Lorraine Sheridan, and Jeff Gavin. 2015. “International
Perceptions of Relational Stalking: The Influence of Prior Relationship, Perpetrator Sex,
Target Sex, and Participant Sex.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 30(18):3308–23.
Scott, W. Richard. 2013. Institutions and Organizations: Ideas, Interests, and Identities. Fourth
165

edition. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Sekiguchi, Tomoki, James P. Burton, and Chris J. Sablynski. 2008. “The Role of Job
Embeddedness on Employee Performance: The Interactive Effects with Leader–Member
Exchange and Organization-Based Self-Esteem.” Personnel Psychology 61(4):761–92.
Simmons, Alicia D. 2017. “Cultivating Support for Punitive Criminal Justice Policies: News
Sectors and the Moderating Effects of Audience Characteristics.” Social Forces
96(1):299–328.
Singh, Barjinder, Margaret A. Shaffer, and T. T. Selvarajan. 2018. “Antecedents of
Organizational and Community Embeddedness: The Roles of Support, Psychological
Safety, and Need to Belong.” Journal of Organizational Behavior 39(3):339–54.
Skocpol, Theda. 1992. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers. Harvard University Press.
Smets, Michael, Paula Jarzabkowski, Gary T. Burke, and Paul Spee. 2014. “Reinsurance Trading
in Lloyd’s of London: Balancing Conflicting-yet-Complementary Logics in Practice.”
Academy of Management Journal 58(3):932–70.
Smith, Daryl R., Brooks C. Holtom, and Terence R. Mitchell. 2011. “Enhancing Precision in the
Prediction of Voluntary Turnover and Retirement.” Journal of Vocational Behavior
79(1):290–302.
Smith, Dorothy E. 2005. Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. Rowman Altamira.
166

Smith, Steven Ratcheb, and Michael Lipsky. 1995. Nonprofits for Hire: The Welfare State in the
Age of Contracting. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Somers, Margaret R., and Fred Block. 2016. “From Poverty to Perversity: Ideas, Markets, and
Institutions over 200 Years of Welfare Debate:” American Sociological Review.
Spector, Malcolm and John I. Kitsuse. 1973. “Social Problems: A Re-Formulation.” Social
Problems 21(2):145–59.
Stalans, Loretta J., Robyn Hacker, and Mary E. Talbot. 2010. “Comparing Nonviolent, Other-
Violent, and Domestic Batterer Sex Offenders: Predictive Accuracy of Risk Assessments
on Sexual Recidivism.” Criminal Justice and Behavior 37(5):613–28.
Storaska, Frederic. 1975. How to Say No to a Rapist and Survive. Random House.
Stukas, Arthur A., Keilah A. Worth, E. Gil Clary, and Mark Snyder. 2007. “The Matching of
Motivations to Affordances in the Volunteer Environment: An Index for Assessing the
Impact of Multiple Matches on Volunteer Outcomes.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector
Quarterly.
Subramanian Ram, Rebecka Moreno, and Sharyn Broomhead. 2014. “Recalibrating Justice: A
Review of 2013 State Sentencing and Corrections Trends.” Center on Sentencing and
Corrections. Vera Institute of Justice.
Sumter, Melvina. 2006. Domestic Violence and Diversity: A Call for Multicultural Services.
167

Journal of Health and Human Services Administration 29(2): 173–190.
Sundeen, Richard A., Cristina Garcia, and Sally A. Raskoff. 2008. “Ethnicity, Acculturation, and
Volunteering to Organizations: A Comparison of African Americans, Asians, Hispanics,
and Whites.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.
Sutton, John R. 2013. “Symbol and Substance: Effects of California’s Three Strikes Law on
Felony Sentencing.” Law & Society Review 47(1):37–72.
Sweet, Paige L. 2015. “Chronic Victims, Risky Women: Domestic Violence Advocacy and the
Medicalization of Abuse.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41(1):81–
106.
Sweet, Paige L. 2019. “The Paradox of Legibility: Domestic Violence and Institutional
Survivorhood.” Social Problems 66(3):411–27.
Thacher, David. 2008. “The Rise of Criminal Background Screening in Rental Housing.” Law &
Social Inquiry 33(1):5–30.
Thornton, Patricia H., Michael Lounsbury, and William Ocasio. 2012. The Institutional Logics
Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process. 1 edition. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, USA.
Thornton, Patricia H., and William Ocasio. 1999. “Institutional Logics and the Historical
Contingency of Power in Organizations: Executive Succession in the Higher Education
168

Publishing Industry, 1958– 1990.” American Journal of Sociology 105(3):801–43.
Tonry, Michael. 2016. “Differences in National Sentencing Systems and the Differences They
Make.” Crime and Justice 45(1):1–16.
Truman, Jennifer. 2011. Criminal Victimization, 2010. NCJ 235508. Bureau of Justice Statistics,
U.S. Department of Justice.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. 2018. “Victims of Criminal Activity: U
Nonimmigrant Status.” USCIS. Retrieved October 7, 2019
Vance, Robert J. 2006. “Employee Engagement and Commitment.” Society for Human Resource
Management. 53.
Vianen, Annelies E. M. Van, Bernard A. Nijstad, and Olga F. Voskuijl. 2008. “A Person-
Environment Fit Approach to Volunteerism: Volunteer Personality Fit and Culture Fit as
Predictors of Affective Outcomes.” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 30(2):153–66.
Voce, Isabella, and Hayley Boxall. 2018. “Who Reports Domestic Violence to Police? A Review
of the Evidence.” Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice (559):1.
Wacquant, Loïc. 2009. Punishing the Poor. Duke University Press.
Wacquant, Loïc. 2015. “For a Sociology of Flesh and Blood.” Qualitative Sociology 38(1):1–11.
Weber, Max. 2012 [1904]. “The ‘Objectivity of Knowledge in Social Science and Social
Policy.” In Max Weber: Collected Methodological Writings, Edited by Hans Henrik
169

Bruun and Sam Whimster. London: Routledge, pp. 100-138.
Webster, Cheryl Marie, and Anthony N. Doob. 2014. “Penal Reform ‘Canadian Style’: Fiscal
Responsibility and Decarceration in Alberta, Canada.” Punishment & Society 16(1):3–31.
Webster, Cheryl Marie, Jane B. Sprott, and Anthony N. Doob. 2019. “The Will to Change:
Lessons from Canada’s Successful Decarceration of Youth.” Law & Society Review
53(4):1092–1131.
Webster, Daniel W., Jennifer Mendel Whitehill, Jon S. Vernick, and Frank C. Curriero. 2013.
“Effects of Baltimore’s Safe Streets Program on Gun Violence: A Replication of
Chicago’s CeaseFire Program.” Journal of Urban Health 90(1):27–40.
Weiss, Benjamin R. 2020. “‘Who Can We Tell Survivors to Call?’ The Institutionalization of
Criminal-Legal Interventions in a Domestic Violence Organization.” Social Problems
67(2):270–85.
Western, Bruce. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America. York, NY: Russell Sage
Foundation.
Westrup, Darrah and William Fremouw. 1998. “Stalking Behavior: A Literature Review and
Suggested Functional Analytic Assessment Technology.” Aggression and Violent
Behavior 3:255–274.
White, Jacquelyn W., and Robin M. Kowalski. 1994. “Deconstructing the Myth of the
170

Nonaggressive Woman: A Feminist Analysis.” Psychology of Women Quarterly
18(4):487–508.
Whittier, Nancy. 2016. “Carceral and Intersectional Feminism in Congress: The Violence
Against Women Act, Discourse, and Policy.” Gender & Society 30(5):791–818.
Wilson, John. 2012. “Volunteerism Research: A Review Essay.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector
Quarterly.
Wolitzky-Taylor, Kate B., Heidi S. Resnick, Jenna L. McCauley, Ananda B. Amstadter, Dean G.
Kilpatrick, and Kenneth J. Ruggiero. 2010. “Is Reporting of Rape on the Rise? A
Comparison of Women With Reported Versus Unreported Rape Experiences in the
National Women’s Study-Replication:” Journal of Interpersonal Violence.
Xie, Min, and James P. Lynch. 2017. “The Effects of Arrest, Reporting to the Police, and Victim
Services on Intimate Partner Violence.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency
54(3):338–78.
Yin, Robert K. 2003. Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Zeng, Zhen, and Yu Xie. 2008. “A Preference-Opportunity-Choice Framework with
Applications to Intergroup Friendship.” AJS; American Journal of Sociology 114(3):615–
48.
Zilber, Tammar B. 2002. “Institutionalization as an Interplay between Actions, Meanings, and
171

Actors: The Case of a Rape Crisis Center in Israel.” The Academy of Management
Journal 45(1):234–54.
Zurbriggen, Eileen L., Robyn L. Gobin, and Jennifer J. Freyd. 2010. “Childhood Emotional
Abuse Predicts Late Adolescent Sexual Aggression Perpetration and Victimization.”
Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma 19(2):204–23.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Gender-based violence—including rape, domestic violence, and stalking—remains common in the United States. Nonprofit race crisis centers, in partnership with federal and local governments, have emerged as a primary response to violence. This dissertation draws on three years of ethnographic observation in a rape crisis center and 40 in-depth interviews with volunteers and staff to understand the challenges faced by these frontline workers when providing social services to victims of violence. What follows are four papers, each of which expands social problems theory or organization theory to explain a distinct paradox or shortcoming in service provision. I show how organizational features—staffing, paperwork, physical architecture, and funding structures—limit some victims’ access to services and set others up with services ill-suited to their needs. These organizational conditions constrain individuals’ actions even when cultural conditions support more effective service provision strategies. Viewed at arm’s length, this dissertation shows how organizations connect broad structural conditions to street-level action. The focus on the tangible features of organizations advanced here helps explain how social structures like culture and political arrangements produce—or fail to produce—particular actions on the ground.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Do no harm: an evaluation study of providing culturally competent services to African American women who are victims of domestic violence

PDF

The revolution will come home: gendered violence and transformative organizing from the Philippines to the U.S.

PDF

In visible families: gay fatherhood and the politics of family change

PDF

Selling virtue: how human rights NGOs and their donors work together to create a better world ... for themselves

Asset Metadata

Creator Weiss, Benjamin R. (author)

Core Title Barriers to effective social service provision in the hybrid welfare state: street-level evidence from an anti-gender-based violence organization

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Publication Date 07/06/2020

Defense Date 04/14/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag domestic violence,non-governmental organizations,OAI-PMH Harvest,organization theory,organizational effectiveness,sexual violence

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Eliasoph, Nina (committee chair), Littlejohn, Krystale (committee member), Messner, Michael (committee member), Rich, Camille (committee member)

Creator Email benjamrw@usc.edu,weissb@oxy.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-324703

Unique identifier UC11663938

Identifier etd-WeissBenja-8637.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-324703 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-WeissBenja-8637.pdf

Dmrecord 324703

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Weiss, Benjamin R.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA