An Analysis of the Social Meanings of Conflict in Nonprofit Organizations

Abstract

This ethnographic study illustrates how staff and management’s sensemaking in conflict in a clerical unit in a Scandinavian nonprofit organization is shaped by institutionalized meanings. Staff and management draw on three institutionalized frameworks when making sense of conflict: The defective personality framework, the diversity framework, and the status inequality framework. Similarly to the organization’s practice of framing “conflicts” as “frictions,” the diversity framework is guided by organizational ideology of egalitarianism and similar to the defective personality framework it emphasises nonconfrontation as a main strategy in processes of conflict management. Despite the organization’s strong commitment to egalitarianism, the clerical workers view status inequality as the origin of many conflicts and they thereby draw from the same institutionalized meanings of political economy of distributional conflicts that the organization was founded to change. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Crafting Compromises in a Strategising Process: A Case Study of an International Development Organisation

“…To analyse the data I arranged it chronologically and identified common themes and emerging patterns. In particular, I conducted line‐by‐line readings of all the strategic review documents and transcripts from the ‘on‐line community’ searching for as many ideas for themes and patterns as possible (Mikkelsen, ). This process focused on changes in the positions being advanced in the strategic review, and then sought to understand the nature of these changes, why they came about and the subsequent reactions from different people within the organisation.…”

Managing Identity Conflicts in Organizations

“…Dart, 2004;Greenspan, 2014;Harris, 2014;Kreutzer & Jager, 2011;Mikkelsen, 2013;Schiller & Almog-Bar, 2013). Dart, 2004;Greenspan, 2014;Harris, 2014;Kreutzer & Jager, 2011;Mikkelsen, 2013;Schiller & Almog-Bar, 2013).…”

Unpacking the Meaning of Conflict in Organizational Conflict Research

“…Scholars, working from a conception of conflict as a social construction, place an emphasis on the role that social context plays in interpretation and conceptualization of conflict (Bartunek et al., ; Gadlin, ; Kolb, ; Mikkelsen, ). These scholars take an interest in the variety of ways conflict is handled in organizations in terms of culturally and locally governed choice.…”

“…Murnighan and Conlon (1991), for example, found that interpretations, together with many other factors such as experiences, culture, and goals, influence and underpin the disputants' approaches to conflict management. With these developments, we begin to see scholars (e.g., Cloven & Roloff, 1991;Kolb, 2008;Lewicki & Gray, 2003;Mather & Yngvesson, 1980;Mikkelsen, 2013;Volkema, Farquhar, & Bergmann, 1996) giving special attention to the social processes of how conflict is framed and made sense of as important for understanding local strategies used in handling conflict.…”