To Empower or Safeguard? How Novice Rape and Domestic Violence Victim Advocates Render Institutional Complexity Visible

Abstract

Organizational life is patterned by shared meanings and practices known as “institutional logics.” Often, multiple logics exist within the same organization in a potentially tense state of “institutional complexity.” Extensive research examines how organizational elites and professionals (i.e., “experts”) manage this complexity by replacing, combining, or segregating contradictory logics. However, experts sometimes manage complexity tacitly, which obscures tensions between logics. This paper, drawing on an ethnographic study of an anti-gender-based violence organization, theorizes inexperience as a lens through which tensions become visible. Analysis of the data reveals that novice victim advocates noticed conflicts between directives to both empower and safeguard victims, practices originating from professional social work and bureaucratic state logics, respectively. In contrast, expert volunteers and staff members tacitly combined these competing logics by empowering victims to safeguard themselves. For organizational scholars, these data show how novices bring attention to contradictions that experts take for granted.