Josh Packard

My organizational interests focus on people who attempt to construct organizations which can manage to coordinate complex and repeated activities, such as worship services, without becoming institutionalized or relying on taken for granted patterns of thought and behavior. I call these organizations resistant organizations. Organizational theories suggest that as an organization grows or persists over time, its activities and structures will gradually come to resemble those of the dominant organizations in the field. I argue that it is possible to resist institutionalization by intentionally utilizing specific structures, organizational processes and developing ideologies which guard against the establishment of taken for granted patterns and routines. In the course of identifying these specific strategies and mechanisms I work toward a theory of organizational resistance. The result is a more accurate understanding of the range of organizational possibilities.

My first empirical study in this vein combines insights from organizational studies and the sociology of religion in order to explain why some religious activities persevere and even prosper despite significant social forces compelling them to conform. This research is based on in-depth interviews and ethnographic data from organizations within the Emerging Church to examine how organizational structures, processes and ideologies might be configured to resist institutionalization and increase options for individual religious expression. In addition to providing evidence for a theory of resistant organizations, this research provides a better understanding of contemporary American Protestantism and religious activity in general.

The best research is always born out of real-life situations. Below, I provide a brief introduction to this research through a retelling of the event which sparked the major research questions.

I will update this page and the Emerging Church page regularly with more detailed findings from the study.

Introduction: A Problem and an Opportunity
In the Fall of 2006 I had the opportunity to spend a week with a group of people who were trying to rethink what religious training might look like in a relatively new kind of church called the Emerging Church. The group of 25 practitioners and thinkers that I was with was committed to avoiding an overly programmatic approach to ministerial training and education. They had all come from traditional church backgrounds and grew distasteful of rigidity of those traditions.

It is not, I admit, an uncommon story in the history of religion. How many religious movements have been borne out of a dislike of traditions which failed to reflect the desires of a changing society? The history of the Christian church is littered with attempts of varying success to reform and reshape existing church models with the Reformation marking the most notable attempt in this direction. What marked this particular effort as unique, however, was that the group viewed the source of their frustration not with the particular traditions themselves, but from the way those traditions were maintained.

On the very first day of the meetings Mary pointed out that “there are two dangers. One is institutionalism and the other is success because that will push it toward institutionalism, and this will cause us to support things just to keep them going. All of the sudden you find yourself doing things that aren’t tied to your vision at all.” The group was very cognizant of how institutionalization limits opportunities for diversity in personal expression. They had all witnessed firsthand religious organizations that did things just because that was the way things had always been done. Mark pointed out that at his old church “I bet we didn’t know why we were doing half of the things we did, other than that we had just always done them that way.”

With these sentiments as a backdrop, the rest of the week was spent in an attempt to figure out how to structure opportunities for people to have access to knowledge and skill sets that would not become overly programmatic. The week ended, however, without resolution. Frequently, individuals in the group would engage me in one on one conversations about this dilemma, seeking my opinion as a sociologist interested in formal organizations. At the time, however, I could offer very little in the way of help. There simply was not much scholarship about organizations which wanted to avoid institutionalization. In the end, there was a call for more conversation but no agreement about how training opportunities could be widespread and available without being institutionalized.

The dilemma posed by this group raises interesting questions about institutionalization and organizations. Namely, is it possible to resist the forces compelling an organization toward institutionalization? What would that look like? How would such an organization operate? Would people take such an organization seriously? If an organization resisted institutionalization, what would hold it together? This dissertation is an attempt to answer these questions. Drawing on interview and ethnographic data from organizations within the Emerging Church I examine how organizational structures, processes and ideologies might avoid the danger of institutionalism that Mary pointed out above.