Triadic Advocacy Work

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Jackson, Summer Rachel; Kellogg, Katherine Cissel
• 署名单位: Harvard University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• 刊物名称: ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7039
• DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2022.1588
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 456-483
• 关键词: occupations and professions; ETHNOGRAPHY; power and politics; work and organizations; ADVOCACY; PUBLIC MANAGEMENT; JUSTICE

摘要

Scholars of street-level bureaucracy and institutional research focus primarily on the relationships between advocates and their larger bureaucratic and social systems, assuming that advocates have little need to satisfy their beneficiaries. We find otherwise in our two-year ethnographic study of public defenders advocating for disadvantaged clients in interactions with district attorneys. In our analysis of 82 advocacy opportunities, we demonstrate that, when existing bureaucratic and social systems put beneficiaries at a disadvantage, advocates may be concerned about managing fraught relationships with their beneficiaries in addition to navigating barriers within the bureaucratic and social systems. We further show a tension between the two; ironically, engaging in advocacy work on behalf of beneficiaries can lead to beneficiary mistrust. As a result, advocates engage in triadic advocacy work-managing impressions with their beneficiaries while also influencing powerful actors within the system on behalf of these same beneficiaries. Understanding the process by which advocates navigate this tension is critical to understanding benefi-ciary outcomes. By reconceptualizing advocacy work as a triadic process among advocate, bureaucratic system, and beneficiary rather than as a dyadic process between advocate and bureaucratic system, this paper develops new theory about how advocates can attempt to garner benefits that advance the rights and opportunities of the disadvantaged.