Legitimizing Organizations via Research: Facilitating Possibilities through the Study of Relational, Emergent, Transformative, and Change-Oriented Organizations (RETCOs)

Abstract

Under multiple public administration reforms since the 1980s, public bureaucracies’ activities range from connecting with markets to inviting the participation of service users, citizens, and networks of organizations in policy development, decision-making, and implementation. Despite this broadening of stakeholder participation, certain organizations are at risk of being overlooked, despite their direct involvement in efforts to engage communities and address persistent social problems. We contend that one reason for this exclusion is that these organizations are not recognized as their own organizational type. This paper identifies Relational, Emergent, Transformative, and Change-Oriented Organizations (RETCOs) as a discrete organizational type, and argues that they should be represented in the model cases that are used to educate public administrators, recognized as worthy of public funding and support, and included in public administration research. Recognizing RETCOs as legitimate stakeholders can correct some of the ethical problems of under-representation of important voices and perspectives in government-citizen interfaces. RETCOs are most appropriately studied through qualitative research methods that are sensitive to what make RETCOs a uniquely responsive organizational type, including their prioritizing of relationships within organizations, emergent rather than fixed organizational forms, goals of transformation, and commitments to liberatory social and economic change.

Keywords:

• Participation
• voice
• organizing process

Since the 1980s, public administrative reforms have attempted to reshape the work of public management, such as broadening whose voice and interests are reflected in policy development, decision-making, and implementation (Torfing et al., 2020). These efforts include New Public Management’s (NPM) focus on market mechanisms and contractually specified outcomes, co-production/co-creation’s attention to the participation of citizens and service users (Kaboolian, 1998; Kettl, 1997), neo-Weberian State’s dual focus on supporting public administrators’ initiative and promoting greater citizen engagement (Bouckaert, 2022), and New Public Governance’s shift of some public management functions to networks of contracted organizations (Osborne, 2010). All of these reforms are designed and implemented by public administrators who themselves are embedded in more traditional bureaucratic structures, where ultimate decision-making, leadership, and contractual specifications are determined centrally (Schlappa & Imani, 2018). These are also targets of reform; representative bureaucracy seeks to make these traditional bureaucratic processes more inclusive and democratic by diversifying those represented in these decision-making positions, and to include equity and inclusiveness alongside traditional outcome measures of efficiency and effectiveness (Ding et al., 2021).

Pursuing broader participation in the work of public management is practically and ethically challenging and aspirational. Efforts to enhance participation typically involve modifying existing organizations and practices, where organizational structures, decision-making, and power relationships in practice may be decoupled from reforms (Schlappa & Imani, 2018). However, change and innovation are difficult for highly inertial organizations (Hannan et al., 2002), including those founded as traditional bureaucracies. Given the pressures of developing processes and systems that achieve multiple and potentially conflicting goals, such as broadening participation and enhancing efficiency, public managers may still focus on supporting typical stakeholder organizations and overlook other kinds of organizations when implementing various reforms. The underrepresentation of particular organizations raises ethical concerns that only certain stakeholder interests are considered while others are ignored, that need to be addressed if public administration seeks to redistribute power and redress oppression.

Such overlooked organizations share certain features: they center relationships between organizational members over efficient management processes; have an overriding commitment to enabling primary stakeholders to exercise voice in decision-making processes and everyday activities; utilize processes that support inclusive participation and the inevitable changes associated with allowing voice¹; welcome emergent versus fixed organizational forms; and prioritize exploring new approaches to meeting critical social issues, rather than reproducing existing organizational models. Such organizations defy the logic of efficiency and demands for specific outcomes driven by fiscal-year contracts and evidence-based processes, rendering these organizations less visible or palatable to public management. Such organizations can be found among nonprofit, social service, social movement, social enterprise, community-based, faith-based, indigenous, and other categories of organizations, where they often are viewed as non-typical. This paper groups these seemingly unusual organizations together as their own type—relational, emergent, transformative, and change-oriented organizations (RETCOs)—and argues that RETCOs warrant more study and support than is currently given, as RETCOs’ processes support innovative and inclusionary outreach to populations important for effective and inclusive civil societies. RETCOs appear in research principally as exceptional or “deviant” cases; their marginalization in undergraduate and professional curriculums constrains practitioners’ understandings of what is possible (Chen & Chen, 2021). Identifying RETCOs as their own type contributes to their legitimization, facilitating their research and teaching (Glynn & Abzug, 2002), which in turn can re-incorporate otherwise overlooked stakeholder interests.

RETCOs explore ways of organizing and delivering services that intentionally include the voice and participation of those excluded from more conventional organizations; moreover, RETCOs’ inclusionary practices are liberatory, and reconfigure relations among persons and institutions. Since RETCOs are committed to participatory, non-hierarchical process over fixed, teleological outcomes, they emphasize organizing rather than organization. For RETCOs, the organizing process is an end in itself, rather than just a means for accomplishing an end. In particular, RETCOs consider building and maintaining relationships as critical to the success of their processes; these processes involve meaning-making, in which members collaboratively form and test understandings around organizing values, practices, and goals. RETCOs bring together those whose voices are underrepresented in conventional citizen-state and user-provider interfaces, and their processes prioritize attention and accountability to such stakeholders’ interests.

This paper aims to make RETCOs more understandable and so deserving of attention by researchers and public managers. It first delves into how RETCOs constitute a distinctive organizational form that should join other model cases that are widely taught and recognized; the cooptation of feminist organizations offers cautionary insights into why the acceptance of RETCOs as a legitimate form is important. The paper then overviews the challenges of studying RETCOs; throughout, it argues that qualitative research methods, particularly participatory ones that help researchers experience RETCOs’ centering relationships, voice, and meaning-making, are well-suited to capturing these dynamic and complex organizing processes. By expanding ways of knowing beyond current canonical limits, researchers of RETCOs can widen possibilities for coordinating collective efforts and the distribution of resources.

Literature review

Conventional taxonomies often differentiate organizations based on aspects such as legal status, form, mission, objectives, and beneficiaries, not organizing processes. Thus, they overlook RETCOs as a separate organizational type, one that exercises a shared commitment of participants to iterative, inclusive, and participatory processes of organizing. For example, nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are an organizational category based on legal incorporation and the non-distribution constraint. Among NPOs, decision-making processes vary, however. Membership NPOs may use inclusive decision-making processes among members, while board-directed nonprofit organizations use hierarchical processes. Organizations grouped together as cooperatives share a commitment to one-person, one-vote, no matter the amount of individual member ownership. Some cooperatives retain this voting process for all or most decisions, while others adopt a board or committee structure. This paper regards NPOs and cooperatives that retain broad participatory processes as RETCOs, but not those with representational or hierarchical decision-making processes. RETCOs, then, may come from various categories of organizations, some familiar to public managers, researchers, and students and others not.

RETCOs may also get grouped with nontraditional categories of organizations that include non-RETCOs as well, such as alternative, hybrid, and social movement organizations. Alternative organizations indicates what they are not, and does not differentiate based upon process (cf. Spicer & Kay, 2022). RETCOs may combine features of different kinds of traditionally classified organizations (Billis, 2010), leading some researchers to principally regard RETCOs as hybrid organizations. Again, classifying based on traditional organizational form and not the processes they utilize. RETCOs are often local and community-based organizations (CBOs) (Vestrum, 2014). However, again, not all CBOs follow broadly participatory decision processes. Non-Western indigenous ways of organizing, especially those with traditions of communal ownership and inclusive processes (Love, 2018, 2019), also include some RETCOs in that category.²

Drawing on the authors’ and other researchers’ managerial and research experiences, this paper asserts that RETCOs are not simply outlier organizations. As evidenced by elite schools, universities, and clubs, conventional organizations’ processes allow privileged members to build and deploy relational connections and networks to their individual and collective advantage (Khan, 2012). RETCOs’ processes create similar relational connections inclusively, often by disrupting hierarchies and privilege. For example, some formal social services, such as the Fountain House Clubhouse Model (Mandiberg & Edwards, 2013), and mutual-support models, such as Alcoholics Anonymous (Zohar & Borkman, 1997), undermine hierarchies by reducing distinctions between service providers and recipients. Rather than replicating prescribed organization processes and forms, RETCOs’ practices are often emergent, depending upon people’s relations, needs, and situations. For instance, at the Burning Man organization, projects arose out of member-identified interests and perceived needs; these experiments ended when no longer needed (Chen, 2009). RETCOs’ processes also are transformative, fostering the growth of individual persons and/or systems. At Agile Learning Center-NYC, practices encourage members to reconfigure their relations with themselves and colleagues as they engage in individual and collective learning (Chen, 2022). Finally, RETCOs’ practices are change-oriented, recognizing that organizational stability, while comfortable, can sustain a harmful status quo. Through stacked decision-making processes, OCCUPY groups tried to disrupt conventional power structures by centering otherwise marginalized female and person of color voices (Hurwitz, 2020).

Given RETCOs’ attentiveness to their organizing processes, how they coordinate efforts towards supporting stakeholders’ interests and other complex goals should be foregrounded for scrutiny by public administrators and researchers who seek innovative organizing processes that support diverse stakeholders. Using the example of human service provision, the paper first explains how environmental conditions can support or suppress RETCOs’ inclusive practices. Then, the paper elucidates the process focus of RETCOs versus the outcome orientation of the organizations that public managers typically engage.

Why RETCOs? The case of publicly funded programs

Organizations that provide human services face multiple, potentially conflicting goals within their institutional environments. Besides providing services, providers are charged with supporting the “social welfare needs of vulnerable populations” while advocating for “social rights” and redressing “social inequality” in housing, education, health, and other areas (Hasenfeld, 2015, p. 1). Since the 1980s, changes in public administration practices—in particular, the introduction of neoliberal policies and New Public Management approaches—favor certain forms of human service organizations, narrowing what policymakers and practitioners view as legitimate and worthy of support. The decline in human services directly provided and managed by public agencies, the increase of contracted human services (Smith & Lipsky, 1993), and growth of for-profit and social enterprise competitors to long-standing human service providers in education and other fields (Chen & Moskop, 2020) have deepened coordination challenges in the already complicated work of public administrators. Publicly operated and contracted human services also must contend with pressure to adopt evidence-based interventions that claim universal applicability, as well as demonstrate standardized accountability (Lee et al., 2023). These demands have reduced the discretion of public managers to utilize locally developed, culturally-based, and community-specific models—“deeply scaled” ones (Dees et al., 2004) that may better fit local conditions and diverse communities. More recently, longstanding issues of structural inequity, lack of diversity, and histories of exclusion have thrust public administrators into the positions of addressing intersecting systemic inequities. Ironically, some administrators will attempt transformations using the same kinds of bureaucratic organizations that reproduce said inequities. Given calls for reforms of state institutions, more participatory and co-created planning processes, and services that are more reflective of the standpoints of the service users, organizations face more ambiguity and uncertainty over what their processes will entail, as well as what outcomes they can facilitate. With all these pressures and demands to do more with inadequate resources, human service providers may revert to processing persons as cases without recognizing the systems and accompanying relations in which people are embedded. Moreover, conventional social and educational services have a low tolerance for problems, as any acknowledged failures may result in contract termination, non-renewal, or other consequence.

RETCOs offer promising possibilities in tackling the kind of complexity and uncertainty that traditionally structured organizations and those that use linear approaches in problem solving often struggle with (Mandiberg et al., 2019; 2020; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002; Weick, 1993). RETCOs’ organizational structures are flatter rather than hierarchical, constantly in flux rather than fixed, and exploratory rather than reproducing known and normative approaches to decision-making, leadership, and modes of service delivery. RETCOs may create short-term hybrid forms that may be transitional and difficult to assess. RETCOs view problems and failures as necessary and generative learning opportunities, inherent in their iterative processes. RETCOs’ embrace of uncertainty (Clampitt et al., 2001), versus the more typical search for predictability and putative outcomes, may make RETCOs risky ventures for public administrators to endorse. By adopting a process approach that encourages rather than constrains diverse practices, administrators can re-balance the distribution of power towards supporting broader sets of service users instead prioritizing the needs of service delivery systems and providers.

Process organizing

The focus on process versus the fixed outcomes of process, including a sequencing of fixed occurrences, has a long tradition in philosophy. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, famous for his observation that one cannot step into the same river twice, proposed that change is reality, with stability being an illusion. In more contemporary times, philosophers Henri Bergson, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Sanders Peirce, and phenomenologists were all concerned with how to understand and represent process. A process approach is often contrasted with the logico-scientific approach that needs fixed occurrences for measurement, comparison, and explanation. All of these philosophers struggled with how to account for the dual nature of lived experience as a stream and as discrete instances.

Organizational studies has started to recognize process in organizations, i.e., organizing, versus the traditional focus on outcomes and organizational artifacts, i.e., organization (Hernes, 2007; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002; Weick et al., 2005), which may require different ontological and epistemological commitments. Ontologically, “(c)hange must not be thought of as a property of organization. Rather, organization must be understood as an emergent property of change” (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002, p. 571). Looking at organizations as enacting process also requires a different way of understanding them, or epistemology. Seidel (2009, p. 124) notes that process has often been treated as the movement from one fixed thing—“positions, rules, strategies, culture, identity, performance”—to another, with what ties the fixed things together being assumed in the movement. Mohr (1982) points out that this stage view of process focuses on variance rather than flow. Additionally, Niederman and March (2018) noted that viewing change as a sequence of discrete events is an “outside” (etic) view of process, one that separates the researcher from the researched. The usual focus on the changing products of organizing also commits the teleological fallacy of conflating intent with effect. The processes of organizations do not necessarily lead to fixed organization outcomes. Process is active, including the changing meanings made by stakeholders. Studying process involves focusing on relations among members and stakeholders, including researchers.

Relational organizing

RETCOs often emerge among those who share close interpersonal relationships and bonds fueled by deeply held commitments to social and political justice, and shared experiences (cf. Mandiberg, 2012). RETCOs’ participatory processes can further animate and legitimate these relationships and shared experiences, particularly among minoritized populations which traditionally have been blocked from exercising power. These relationships can also include the researchers who may share affinities in values. Additionally, the methods that are often used in studying RETCOs—ethnographic, participatory and interview-based—deepen relationships between organizational members and researchers. However, much of conventional research practices elide the relational dimensions of conducting and disseminating research. For example, to reduce bias, maintain objectivity, and avoid “going native,” positivist guidelines urge researchers to maintain arm’s length distances from interlocutors. Some researchers may feel compelled to downplay how their pre-existing knowledge and relationships as acquaintances, friends, activists, or co-workers facilitated access to their research sites. These actions privilege “distance” from a phenomenon, obscuring how researchers’ closeness with their phenomena may impart, rather than circumscribe, insights (Anteby, 2013).

Such distance-invoking measures in turn can amplify misunderstandings or worse, exploitation. Because marginalized communities have had their bodies, experiences, cultural practices, and sacred objects appropriated without any say or attribution in past research, they are often reluctant to participate in subsequent studies and may view dominant research practices with suspicion (Smith, 2023). These groups may engage in refusal (Simpson, 2014). Without their own venues for externally validating their forms of knowledge, they are reliant upon unequal power relations to disperse and preserve their understandings (Smith, 2023), requiring researchers who choose to act as “facilitators” among fields of knowledge to be attentive to these asymmetries (Santos, as cited in Dale & Robertson, 2004). Public administrators can similarly facilitate or constrain various ways of knowing through what they support and ask of RETCOs.

To support these efforts, institutions and gatekeepers must recognize and compensate for the particular hurdles that facilitators face when circulating these forms of knowledge. One step is expanding the notion of what Monika Krause (2021) has called “model cases,” or examples that are taught and cited to the point that they shape standards. A related step involves supporting more interpretivist approaches, so that contextualized, situated depictions of organizing are accepted alongside abstract typologies (cf. Cunliffe, 2022). Diversifying forms of knowledge would forestall what Santos depicted as “epistemicides,” or the killing of knowledges that don’t uphold normative understandings (Dale & Robertson, 2004), by knowledges that reinforce traditional power asymmetries. Another step is to create hospitable environments for research on RETCOs through professional associations, conferences, and within the academy. If RETCOs can secure legitimate status, this can help rewrite inappropriate standards developed from conventional organizations that force RETCOs to assimilate or shutter. When offered funding from public agencies, RETCOs are particularly vulnerable to such undesired outcomes, as the next section describes with feminist organizations that lost their distinctive practices.

Cooptation: When organization is overvalued relative to process/organizing

The cooptation of feminist organizations offers cautionary examples of what happens when external funders and evaluators overvalue organization—an idealized, fixed state—over the messier, difficult-to-document processes of organizing. During the 1960s and 1970s, various US groups sought to promote participatory processes in confronting institutional failures to support social needs and rectify social and structural injustices. These RETCOs included grassroots social movements, free clinics (Nelson, 2011; Taylor, 1979), democratic schools (Swidler, 1979), intentional communities, and cooperative workplaces (Rothschild-Whitt, 1979). The service organizations launched by second wave feminist social movements of the 1970s are, perhaps, the best researched examples of RETCOs from this period. Women’s health clinics and abortion, domestic violence, and rape crisis services often started with volunteer labor by movement activists. These RETCOs attempted to reconfigure power relations through consensual decision processes, ad hoc or rotating administrative responsibilities for such activities as decision-making, record keeping, and budget-related activities, and no distinction between service providers and service users (Matthews, 1995; Morgen, 1995).

Many studies discussed how these organizations shed their transformative practices as they started receiving funding and joined more traditional service systems. As Morgen (1995, p. 239–240), a researcher-activist recounted, “To generate external funds, clinics faced wrenching periods of self-reflection, restructuring, and often dramatic organizational changes… these changes meant more hierarchy and bureaucracy in internal structures, decreased political autonomy, and an attenuation of political goals of the organization.” Such RETCOs replaced consensus decision-making with top-down processes, conformed to forms of record keeping that belied fundamental commitments of the group (e.g., making a distinction between providers and receivers of services), introduced hierarchical sources of accountability and expertise, and professionalized staff and their training. These changes undermined these RETCOs’ inclusive processes, making them more isomorphic with the organizations in their network and their funders. Case studies of feminist service organizations detailed their struggles to retain their missions and democratic processes, and yet meet the expectations of funders and partners.

Once RETCOs start making changes, members may find these initial concessions a slippery slope. For example, in response to external pressures, the feminist RETCOs often bureaucratized by first rotating director responsibilities, then designating co-directors, and finally appointing single directors over the organization or its component programs. As those outside of the organizations demanded faster decision-making, decision processes moved from full consensus to “modified consensus” (Iannello, 1992). When modified consensus were not time-sensitive enough, these organizations introduced hierarchies based on positional authority or expertise to expedite decisions (Johnson, 1981; Schechter, 1982).

As feminist RETCOs became integrated into more traditional service systems, their efforts shifted from enabling transformation towards signaling procedural conformity with expected citizen-state relations. Regarding services of rape crisis centers (RCCs), Matthews recounted, “(t)he state and our RCCs agree that rape crisis work should be done, but they differ over what the work is and how it should be done” (1995, p. 296). For example, founding processes were undercut in favor of replicable practices and predictable outcomes. Feminist domestic violence centers prioritized tackling the social causes of domestic violence against women, grounded in patriarchy. When these centers became part of more traditional networks, were integrated into other organizations, or were required to report contractually specified outcomes, their services instead focused predominantly on psychotherapy services for the affected women. This shift from empowering stakeholders to engage patriarchy, to fix-the-individual client, eroded what had made these service innovative and relevant (Bierria, 2017), undermining goals of transforming relations and systems.

To forestall cooptation, some contemporary activists advocate resisting what they call the “nonprofit industrial complex” (cf. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, 2017) in which CBOs compete for grants and governmental contracts. While this system allocates resources that can extend organizational longevity, these also discourage interorganizational cooperation, organizational innovation, and community participation (Dunning, 2022). Choosing not to participate in state support or philanthropy also has consequences. Advocates’ knowledge may not circulate beyond their communities. Moreover, advocates burn-out over insufficient resources or, tiring of limited pay and health benefits, join institutions that hire social movement leaders to signal their commitment to diversity. If agents of the state truly are interested in innovating and upholding stakeholder interests, how can public managers support RETCOs’ pursuit of founding goals without undermining RETCOs’ processes? How can researchers assist public sector managers and the organizations they contract with to be better understood? How can studies of RETCOs help educate future public and nonprofit managers and entrepreneurs about how to create and sustain relation-based, change-oriented organizations? Research on democratic foundations (Cox, 2021) and giving circles (Eikenberry, 2009), and co-creation (Schwoerer et al., 2022), among others, offer promising precedents in how public managers can avoid undermining RETCOs’ processes. Nevertheless, these questions underscore how researchers need to rethink research methods to facilitate ways of knowing organizations.

Issues in researching RETCOs

How to research RETCOs

The relational, process, and generative foundations of RETCOs most often lead researchers to choose qualitative methods for studying RETCOs. These favor emic versus etic approaches, ones that capture emergence versus the products of processes, ones that include broad and disparate voices, and ones that additionally capture the messiness of collective meaning-making by the organizational members and researchers. A process-oriented methodology contrasts with conventional approaches designed for documenting and replicating studies (Kara, 2015) which, as discussed above, artificially impose stopping points in the processes of organizing. These ontological (what is happening) and epistemological (how do I understand what is happening) differences yield very different research studies. Typical methods for researching RETCOs include ethnographic, participatory, interview, and narrative research, and the emerging use of design, non-Western indigenous, and decolonizing research methods (Smith, 2023).³ Appropriate analyses can incorporate the collective versus individual, or the aggregation of individual, data, and non-human actors that are not recognized as such in the Western research canon (Liboron & Lepawsky, 2022).

Building upon these methods, nonprofit scholars have adopted critical approaches to research, particularly in studying conventional NPOs, that aim to uncover asymmetric power relations that can inflict both epistemicides and stunt organizations and their stakeholders (Dean & Wiley, 2022; Dodge et al., 2022; Feit & Sandberg, 2022; Meyer et al., 2022; Nickels & Leach, 2021). These approaches reveal systems of domination, as well as widening understandings beyond organizational “instrumentality” and “profitability” (Coule et al., 2022b). Using these approaches, studies delve into taken-for-granted assumptions, such as whether NPOs and civil society are fundamentally “positive” and how the widespread adoption of managerial and capitalist practices have distorted organizations’ abilities to serve stakeholders (Coule et al., 2022a. p. 473–474). These emphases echo institutionalist critiques, which noted that organizations’ interests in longevity could cause goal displacement and even the institutional capture and exploitation of vulnerable populations (Perrow, 1986).

Human subjects conventions will also need to change, especially when the qualitative research design includes the researcher as a participant in organizational activities. “Informed” consent requirements that attempt to rectify prior unethical medical research overlook the realities of forming relationships as research projects evolve. Until new Institutional Review Board (IRB) norms and practices are instituted, researchers have to argue that demanded practices like written informed consent may not work for RETCOs. Oftentimes IRB procedures fundamentally fail to understand inductive research methods, such as interviews and observations. Here, updating understandings of what constitutes quality qualitative research are needed (cf. Small & Calarco, 2022).

In educating future researchers, curricula are increasingly including some exposure to non-normative issues and methods, e.g., indigenous approaches to research (Smith, 2023), critical studies of research methods (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020; Mirabella et al., 2022), abductive reasoning (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014), and non-traditional epistemologies (Wigginton & Lafrance, 2019). Research on RETCOs often employ such non-normative approaches and therefore can assist students to move from an abstract understanding of how and why these approaches are different, to concrete examples of research successfully utilizing them. Moreover, such expansionary exposure could increase tolerance for and expectations of process-related ambiguity particularly evident in RETCOs and shared with more conventional organizations, as pandemic and state failures have demonstrated. Additionally, research on RETCOs can be useful examples for how to secure IRB approval and peer review of nontraditional research.

Site selection (and why it matters)

RETCOs may be under the radar of public managers and researchers who are familiar with traditional organizations, those that are already publicly supported, and those that are in need of new sources of support, including competing for public contracts, philanthropic grants, and newer means of support such as venture funding and earned income. This unfamiliarity, and the risks and compromises inherent in some of these choices (Dunning, 2022; INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, 2017) is especially true of nascent RETCOs founded by neighborhood groups, historically excluded populations, social movements, workers seeking improved conditions and influence, service users looking for more responsive services and educational opportunities for family members, and other relationship-based organizing. Identifying potential RETCO research sites and opportunities for future public support may be challenging, even when the researcher knows of a RETCO from prior personal relationships or participation. Selecting a RETCO for research, then, may present different challenges than more traditional organizations.

Despite these challenges, the organizational canon must expand to include RETCOs. Otherwise, more familiar organizational forms are overrepresented and then become model cases for future research. Krause (2021) has urged greater attention to studying “neglected cases” and has recommended that researchers emphasize how accepted cases are “one case among many possible cases” (p. 32). In North American organizational studies and practices, bureaucratic and corporate forms are the model cases. The Weberian conception of bureaucracy leads practitioners and researchers to assume that all organizations, including voluntary associations, nonprofit organizations, and public agencies should have a hierarchy, division of labor, and employment as a career.

Such foci have attendant consequences for ways of knowing. When selecting what to study, a foreshortened view of organizational forms, or focusing on organizational form versus organizing processes, narrows researchers’ choices of what to study and publish, and how those choices may affect their careers. Studies of RETCOs may face longer journeys to dissemination and publication, especially if researchers cannot find gatekeepers who can connect them with supportive conferences and reviewers. In particular, the pool of reviewers who are willing and capable of assessing resultant manuscripts is much smaller than for manuscripts centering model cases. Worse yet, reviews may recommend inappropriate methodologies or analytic frames or urge rejection of a publication submission.

The promotion of certain organizational forms and practices and the erasure and absence of others can shrink audiences’ curiosity about the diversity of organizations and underplay what is possible. While attention to model cases can promote a depth of understanding of particular organizational forms, it can also create a vicious cycle that promotes the ascendancy of certain forms, especially through the teaching of such studies. When limited organizational forms are taught normatively in undergraduate and public administration, nonprofit management, human services management, and other professional programs, they could inadvertently decrease practitioners’ awareness of and receptivity towards organizational diversity. For example, the teaching and implementation of planning in the public sector favors putative certainty. These are reflected in logic models that are taught and required by funders and cases featured in management courses, where outcomes—even multiple possible outcomes—satisfy student learning expectations for measurable stages and deliverables. Such emphases delegitimize RETCOs’ iterative processes and indeterminate outcomes. If RETCOs are not researched and taught, their absence from model cases have substantive, downstream effects, curbing the scope of current reforms—for instance, public managers may be reluctant to contract with organizations that tolerate and even welcome uncertainty (Roberts & Wernstedt, 2019)—and raising ethical concerns about whether stakeholder interests have been adequately considered.

Discussion: Leveraging ways of knowing

In general, understandings of organizations have been anchored on conventional organizations—their forms and characteristics, their exchanges, and their development. When RETCOs are measured against capitalist markets and conventional business firms, or even conventional NPOs, researchers have difficulties with recognizing, much less respecting, a range of values and processes, as doing so may entail reputational risks. But these gulfs can be used to researchers’ analytic advantage, allowing them to question their assumptions and better understand their own cultures through their phenomena. For Chen (2022), long-term relationships with enabling organizations helped channel her efforts to understand her roles in conventional organizations into “Learning how to be a scyborg: How prefigurative organizations can promote capacity to decolonialize organizations.”

Here, epistemic communities in which facilitators can deepen conversations about ways of knowledge are integral. For instance, Chen and Mandiberg have co-organized intellectual communities via professional associations. These spaces are important for coalescing researchers around studying less recognized phenomena and getting feedback—areas taken for granted by scholars of conventional phenomena. These communities’ activities not only highlight and legitimize such research, but they also contribute in other substantive ways by, for example, diversifying syllabi and reading lists and articulating policies that can support practitioners.

These kinds of efforts can help researchers meet or even better, alter standards at their home institutions so that diverse ways of knowing are not subjected to institutional epistemicides. Otherwise, when a university (or larger accrediting body, as in the case of the United Kingdom’s Association of Business School rankings) assigns worth to quantifiable outputs and limits to acceptable dissemination outlets, this milieu can undermine knowledge-sharing norms in other settings. At worst, it can dissuade or suppress what is studied—in the receptivity of organizations to research, as well as the positions and dispositions of researchers to conducting research.

RETCOs’ lack of visibility inevitably impacts practitioners and the potential reach of current and future governmental reforms. Representation in research has a legitimizing function, encouraging others to benefit from some of the creative possibilities that participatory and democratic organizations provide. For funders, contract managers, and regulators, seeing more research on RETCOs also has the potential to free them to work with RETCOs to address community needs that seem intractable for more traditional organizational forms and methods. Such efforts can be expanded with, say, call for proposals guidelines that urge conventional organizations to learn about RETCOs and how they support citizen-state interactions, as well as outreach to encourage RETCOs to participate in contracting, reserving contracts for RETCOs, and adjusting expected contracting benchmarks. For researchers, including those with activist backgrounds, engaging with RETCOs can be stimulating and renewing. Rather than documenting what exists, researching RETCOs often documents what is possible. RETCOs’ expansion of possibilities is why, often, RETCOs are the source of innovations that have later impacts on organizational fields.

No fixed set of research methods apply equally well in studying the complexity of RETCOs. Thus, researchers need to be open, creative, and flexible in their research. Otherwise, if researchers slavishly collect data on known variables, particularly those derived from conventional model cases, they may misapprehend RETCOs’ processual and relational emphases. Qualitative and other participatory methods, where researchers can experience RETCOs’ organizing processes firsthand, are preferable. Researchers may also need to adopt in-process abductive data and analysis methods (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014) and find new ways of documenting processes. Finally, researchers may need to engage meaning-making around their multiple roles that include serving as facilitators. In doing so, not only can researchers amplify the voices of those otherwise overlooked by conventional research practices, but they also can connect groups with conduits of power that previously were inaccessible and inhospitable, overcoming both a practical and ethical conundrum. By practicing a wider range of qualitative methods, researchers then make available other ways of understanding and assessing organizations to practitioners and public managers.

Although not directly research-related, this paper and its cited literature have raised two important issues. The case of how liberatory feminist social movement organizations were changed by the requirements and influences of their funding, and other cited instances of this (e.g., INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence), raise the issue of whether RETCOs should pursue funding from public and philanthropic sources. The short answer may be “with eyes wide open.” Public and philanthropic sources of funding are not monolithic. Public bureaucracies and foundations often have staff with a wide range of commitments and beliefs, who may have some discretion over what organizations are funded, and how, including opportunities for discretionary funding as in fourth quarter budget surpluses. Those kinds of opportunities create ways to fund organizations that may not look fundable utilizing traditional competitive funding mechanisms, and once funded can lead RETCOs to access more traditional funding mechanisms. RETCOs should make a habit of identifying sympathetic public administrators for just this type of discretionary support.

The second important issue is the relationship of RETCOs to public administration and nonprofit management education. At various points, the paper has shown how and why the study of RETCOs is important. Although the inclusion of RETCOs in management studies deserves a paper on its own, we believe that this paper takes the first step towards bridging knowledge by naming RETCOs as a discrete and not uncommon outcome of organization, rather than as odd or deviant. Since naming facilitates seeing something formerly veiled, we hope that instructors and students alike will find that RETCOs are not uncommon at all, but comprise generative possibilities in the public and nonprofit sectors. This recognition of RETCOs will hopefully lead to their incorporation into public management curricula and the practice of public and nonprofit management.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the audiences at the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research (SCANCOR) at Stanford University and the annual meeting for the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) for their comments on presentations of earlier versions of this paper, as well as the guest editors and journal editors, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term primary stakeholders refers to clients or participants to distinguish them from other stakeholders, such as evaluators, certifiers, or licensers.

2 RETCOs include Rothschild and Whitt’s (1986) collectivist-democratic organization, an ideal-type that identifies organizations based on practices that afford flexibility, voice, and commitment to a collective mission. However, RETCOs more broadly highlights processes and without imposing the term democratic upon collectivities; thus, RETCOs can include groups that do not foreground democratic processes. For instance, groups that center indigenous and persons of color have other terms for their processes that foreground interdependence and relations with the past and future generations.

3 Such methods are not inherently adept at capturing process and meaning-making among RETCOs; these methods can still be deployed in superficial, extractive, and exploitative ways—see for example, complaints about how the use of interviews can misreport persons’ actual practices (Jerolmack & Khan, 2014).