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

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).