Constructing Organizational Life
Thomas B. Lawrence & Nelson Phillips
392 pages, OUP Oxford, 2019
In our recent book Constructing Organizational Life, we propose a new way of understanding and analyzing the social world that we believe is particularly relevant to understanding social innovation. Our focus in the book is on the efforts of interested actors who work to shape the social world around them. Rather than examining social structures and processes as is common in social science, we believe in the value of a perspective that highlights the actors and actions that produce, transform, and maintain those structures and processes. We call this activity social-symbolic work.
We argue that by focusing on the intentional efforts of people and groups to shape the social world, we can come to a richer understanding of how it came to be the way that it is, how it is held in place, how it changes, and who makes all these things happen – questions that are central to the study and practice of social innovation. In this article, we provide some introductory ideas from the book before sharing an excerpt that focuses directly on social innovation.
We define social-symbolic work as “the purposeful, reflexive efforts of individuals, collective actors, and networks of actors to shape social-symbolic objects” (2019:31). In the book, we draw on existing literatures that explore agency, action, and practice to elaborate this definition in a number of ways. First, we argue that social-symbolic work involves heterogeneous forms of agency that can be oriented toward the past, present, and future. Second, it is bundled into programs of action that, while not continuous, are coherent in their aims and the actors involved. Finally, social-symbolic work involves the enactment of repertoires of practices available within a social system, and thus depends on the awareness, ability, and resources required to enact those practices.
Social-symbolic work focuses on social-symbolic objects – meaningful patterns in social systems that are generally pragmatic and often associated with political contests over their meaning and evaluation. These include, for instance, people’s identities, organizational practices, and product categories. Social-symbolic work, then, is the purposeful, reflexive efforts of individuals, collective actors, and networks of actors to shape social-symbolic objects. These efforts, we argue, occur through heterogeneous forms of agency bundled into programs of action that constitute the enactment of practices. Finally, we argue that all instances of social-symbolic work have discursive, relational, and material dimensions, the salience of which will depend on the intentions of actors, the practices in which they engage, and the social-symbolic objects in question.
Our intention in writing Constructing Organizational Life was to establish a perspective that is useful in thinking about and researching how organizations, their contexts, and the selves that inhabit them are purposefully constructed, how this happens, and the contribution of this activity to the ongoing construction of the social world. While social construction is not, of course, completely driven by intentional action, we argue that the role of intentional action has been underemphasized and there is much to gain from a more comprehensive account of social-symbolic work in constructing organizational life.
Our discussion of self work, organization work, and institutional work suggests some important common threads among these streams of research that have thus far remained separate. Most fundamentally, research on all three categories of social-symbolic work has established the ability of individuals, collective actors, and networks of actors to purposefully and reflexively engage with facets of organizational life that were previously treated as influential but often outside the reach of intentional action. Earlier writing on social-symbolic objects, such as institutions, values, emotions, and identities, treated them as having powerful impacts on organizational members, but overlooked or understated the degree to which the causal arrow might be reversed.
We believe that social innovation is fundamentally about social-symbolic work and that our perspective is therefore highly relevant to anyone with an interest in social innovation. We hope our short introduction was helpful in explaining our perspective and in understanding the following excerpt about social innovation drawn from the book. – Thomas Lawrence & Nelson Phillips
A Social-Symbolic Work Perspective on Social Innovation
In 1998, Mark Richardson and Paul Harrod founded Aspire, a UK-based retail business with a mission to fight homelessness (see Tracey et al., 2011). Richardson and Harrod believed that the solution to homelessness was not to provide housing, but to give the homeless decent jobs. Aspire was thus created to provide employment for homeless people while making a profit that could be reinvested in growing the business and putting on programs to help the homeless workers build skills. In creating Aspire, Richardson and Harrod sought to bridge two different logics – those of for-profit retail and non-profit homelessness support. Novel at the time, their aim was to create a new kind of social-purpose organization that would not require ongoing financial support from the government or from external donors. Unfortunately, Richardson and Harrod turned out to be better innovators than managers: The jobs they provided were of tremendous benefit to their employees, but Aspire failed to make profits sufficient to support the social enterprise. As a business it was a failure, but as a case of social innovation it was a success: The Aspire experiment, the work that Richardson and Harrod did communicating their vision, and their collaboration with government inspired a number of other charities to add for-profit business to their activities in the homeless sector.
Social innovation represents the creation of novel solutions to pressing social problems. Proponents of social innovation argue it has emerged as an important response to social problems because “existing structures and policies have found it impossible to crack some of the most pressing issues of our times” (Murray et al., 2010: 3). Traditionally, responses to social problems have come from government or markets, both of which have serious limitations when facing complex social problems: The “policies and structures of government have tended to reinforce old rather than new models,” whereas the “market … lacks the incentives and appropriate models to solve many of these issues” (Murray et al., 2010: 3-4).
In contrast, social innovation is associated with (often small) organizations built or repurposed to create, distribute, and institutionalize new approaches to serious problems, often in ways that cut across traditional sectoral boundaries (Seelos and Mair, 2005). Aspire represented exactly such an organization: Motivated by the failure of the market to address the needs of homeless people, its founders attempted to create an organization in which the incentives of all parties were aligned to allow self-sufficiency on the part of both the organization and its employees.
Social Innovation as Social-Symbolic Work
To see how the social-symbolic work perspective we are developing might be useful to social innovators, we first unpack the definition of social innovation in social-symbolic work terms, focusing in particular on the idea of a social problem, and what makes for an effective, and innovative response.
A focus on social problems is a widely shared anchor for understanding social innovation and its aims. In a much-cited review of social innovation research, Phills et al. (2008:3) argue that social problems represent a coalescing point – although stakeholders often argue about the best courses of action, there “tends to be greater consensus within societies about what constitutes a social need or problem.” While this observation may reflect common tendencies, it also shows little awareness that the identification and description of problems might itself be the contentious outcome of processes of social construction. Writing on social innovation tends to ignore conflict around the definition of social problems, instead citing examples such as poverty that seem to evoke a consensus on the need to act. But even poverty as a social problem is contentious (its boundaries, its roots, its relationship to race, ethnicity, and gender), let alone issues such as sexual and reproductive rights, or the unequal distribution of global financial resources. Despite the centrality of social problems to discussions of social innovation, actors in this arena have left relatively unexplored questions such as how certain problems come to dominate other issues, how problems are defined and understood, and how focusing on certain problems might come at the cost of not examining other issues (Loseke, 2003).
How social problems are identified and evaluated is an important point of connection between social innovation and social-symbolic work. If what constitutes a social problem is socially negotiated in ways that reflect the norms, values, and beliefs of those involved, as well as the power relations among them (Lawrence et al., 2013), then the constitution of social problems depends on forms of social-symbolic work. Institutional work, for instance, is core to defining social problems: If we take homelessness as an example, defining the category of “homeless” is centrally important to understanding the problem and responding to it. At its most restrictive, the concept describes people who are not “buying or paying mortgage or rent on a primary residence and living in it regularly” (Bogard, 2001:107). But Shelter (the advocacy NGO) argues for a much more inclusive definition, counting people as homeless if they are “staying with friends or family; staying in a hostel, night shelter or B&B; squatting … ; at risk of violence or abuse in your home; … [or] living apart from your family because you don’t have a place to live together” (Shelter, 2018). Clearly, which of these definitions prevails will have a massive impact on how much of a problem it is considered to be (since far more people would “count” as homeless under the Shelter definition), and a much wider array of resources might be employed in response.
Self work is also important to the definition of social problems, particularly when definitions connect social problems and individual failings. Some of the most contentious debates of our time revolve around the role of choice in contributing to individual suffering, and consequently whether and how that suffering constitutes a “social problem.” Global variation in approaches to drug use and addiction highlight the centrality of socially constructed selves in understanding social problems: The US-based “war on drugs” has at its core a conceptualization of drug users as immoral and criminal; in contrast, “harm reduction” approaches in Europe, Canada, and Australia are based on an understanding of drug users as suffering from a chronic health condition rooted in social structures and systems, and hence require interventions that minimize the health, social, and economic harms of drug use. These conceptualizations are more than abstract categories; they are applied to individuals at the local level, with immediate and profound consequences for those individuals.
Moving from the social problem to the response to that problem, social innovation continues to involve significant social-symbolic work. Despite ongoing disagreements over the nature of social innovation, the idea that social innovation creates systemic change in social systems has received considerable support (Murray et al., 2010; Nilsson, 2003). Westley and Antadze (2010:2), for example, distinguish between “social inventions” and social innovation on the basis that the latter effects, or is at least intended to effect, transformational change in social systems, potentially challenging “the very institutions that created the social problem which they address.”
The distinction between social invention and social innovation provides a useful basis for understanding the importance of social-symbolic work in this area. Whereas social inventions might be fundamentally technological, such as dean-burning stoves, social innovation involves efforts to shape the social-symbolic objects that constitute the context in which those inventions are employed. Drawing on our own work (Lawrence and Dover, 2015), a wet weather mat program in a suburban neighborhood might represent a social invention, providing shelter to those without housing. But the process through which its creators challenged the assumptions and beliefs about homelessness in that neighborhood, created social connections among a range of organizations and individuals, and shifted the values of a community represents a significant social innovation.
Thus, we would argue that at its core, social innovation is social-symbolic work. Social innovation describes the efforts of actors to achieve positive social change by effecting transformational change in social systems. It begins with the self, organization, and institutional work of defining important social problems and goes on to include all those kinds of work in effecting systemic social change. Consequently, we argue that this perspective has value for social innovators trying to create positive social change in the world.
The Value of a Social-Symbolic Work Perspective for Doing Social Innovation
For social innovators, the value of a social-symbolic work perspective is tied to how it can help shift behaviors and beliefs – their own, the people who work with them (and against them), and the populations they serve. We have already discussed the importance of institutional work and self work in defining social problems and focusing on systemic change as the outcome of social innovation. Along with these forms of social-symbolic work, social innovators need to engage in organization work to establish durable social mechanisms that respond to the problems they care about. Achieving systemic change, we argue, depends on social innovators engaging in strategy work that establishes a robust, compelling narrative that will engender the enduring support from stakeholders necessary for the organization to effect the intended change, and adapt to the inevitable, unexpected consequences of and responses to its actions. Social innovators also need to engage in boundary work in order to corral needed resources and create boundary objects that allow them to coordinate across organizational and sectoral boundaries. Finally, social innovation depends on technology work, and not only in relation to the digital creations that garner so much popular attention, but also to effect much more prosaic material responses, which are often at the heart of effective, cost-efficient solutions.
We see the concept of social-symbolic work as potentially valuable to social innovators primarily as a lens on the needs of their project or organization, including the self work, organization work, and institutional work needed to accomplish some goal. In the time- and resource-pressured world of social innovators, there may be a tendency to focus on what gets asked for (especially by resource providers, such as a funder), which may not be aligned with the diffuse and complex requirements associated with managing the emotions, identities, and careers of employees and clients, the boundaries, technologies, and strategies of the social innovation organization, and the categories and practices that may ultimately resolve or maintain the social problem that motivates the whole enterprise. Moreover, social innovators, like all of us, have histories. They have lives filled with personal and professional experiences that sensitize them to some facets of social reality while leaving them relatively ignorant of or apathetic about other parts. The holistic and integrative character of social-symbolic work as a concept is, therefore, a valuable addition to a social innovator’s toolkit to the extent that it helps them overcome some of those blinders and soften some of those biases.