research-article

Triadic Advocacy Work

Authors:

Summer Rachel Jackson,

Katherine Cissel KelloggAuthors Info & Claims

Organization Science, Volume 34, Issue 1

Pages 456 - 483

https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1588

Published: 01 January 2023 Publication History

Abstract

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 beneficiary 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.

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Cited By

Riley S(2024)Overriding (in)justice: pretrial risk assessment administration on the frontlinesProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency10.1145/3630106.3658920(480-488)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3630106.3658920

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cover image Organization Science

Organization Science Volume 34, Issue 1

January-February 2023

510 pages

ISSN:1526-5455

DOI:10.1287/orsc.2023.34.issue-1

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Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International License. You are free to download this work and share with others for any purpose, except commercially, and you must attribute this work as “Organization Science. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1588, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.”

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Publication History

Published: 01 January 2023

Accepted: 11 February 2022

Received: 10 July 2019

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Riley S(2024)Overriding (in)justice: pretrial risk assessment administration on the frontlinesProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency10.1145/3630106.3658920(480-488)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3630106.3658920

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