• search hit 1 of 7
Back to Result List

Scaffolding: A Process of Transforming Patterns of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies

  • This study advances research on organizational efforts to tackle multidimensional, complex, and interlinked societal challenges. We examine how social inequality manifests in small-scale societies, and illustrate how it inheres in entrenched patterns of behavior and interaction. Asking how development programs can be organizing tools to transform these patterns of inequality, we use a program sponsored by an Indian non-governmental organization as our empirical window and leverage data that we collected over a decade. We identify “scaffolding” as a process that enables and organizes the transformation of behavior and interaction patterns. Three interrelated mechanisms make the transformation processes adaptive and emerging alternative social orders robust: (1) mobilizing institutional, social organizational, and economic resources; (2) stabilizing new patterns of interaction that reflect an alternative social order; and (3) concealing goals that are neither anticipated nor desired by some groups. Through this analysis, we move beyond conventional thinking on unintended consequences proposed in classic studies on organizations, complement contemporary research about how organizations effect positive social change by pursuing multiple goals, and develop portable insights for organizational efforts in tackling inequality. This study provides a first link between the study of organizational efforts to alleviate social problems and the transformation of social systems.

Export metadata

Additional Services

Share in Twitter Search Google Scholar
Metadaten
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Author(s):Johanna MairORCiD, Miriam Wolf, Christian Seelos
Parent Title (English):Academy of Management Journal
ISSN:0001-4273
Publication year:2016
First Page:2021
Last Page:2044
DOI:https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2015.0725
Release Date:2018/02/05
Volume:59
Issue:6
Licence of document (German):Metadaten / metadata
Verstanden ✔
Diese Webseite verwendet technisch erforderliche Session-Cookies. Durch die weitere Nutzung der Webseite stimmen Sie diesem zu. Unsere Datenschutzerklärung finden Sie hier.