Rethinking Organizational Decoupling

Abstract

Neoinstitutionalists have long recognized that organizations must negotiate complex organizational fields to survive. Yet, this ever-sharpening focus on external environments comes at the expense of attending to how micro-level dynamics facilitate or inhibit organizational survival. In this article, and building on insights from research focusing on shop-floor contestation, we reexamine decoupling—that is, possible divergence of formal procedures and everyday practices—and draw on our own case study work on the United Steelworkers. Our analyses show that reforms directed toward restructuring the Steelworker’s organizing program were thwarted by organizational members with a stake in the old order that no longer serves the union’s long-term organizational interest. This offers some needed correctives and insights, namely, that (1) decoupling may be maladaptive and (2) that it should be understood as a contingent outcome of local power struggles over work within organizations as they respond to changing institutional fields. These conclusions have clear implications not only for the study of labor unions but also for a more general understanding of how situated organizational actors respond to structural shifts in historically constituted institutional fields.