Best Friends Forever: Relationship Schemas, Organizational Forms, and Institutional Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholars have drawn on cultural concepts to demonstrate the capacity of organizational actors to transform existing institutional scripts and invent new ones. When it comes to accounting for the limits on such change, however, scholars have tended to fall back on structural dynamics. I argue that paying attention to the symbolic analogies and oppositions in terms of which institutional schemas have meaning can shed light on the role of cultural constraints alongside creativity in institutional change. In this article, I investigate schemas of personal relationships. By transposing the obligations and expectations of a familiar relationship from one kind of interaction to another—by treating employees like members of a sports team or a research collaborative, for example—organizational actors can bring about new habits of interaction and create new organizational forms. But people’s emotional investment in the integrity of a relationship script may make them unwilling to modify the script when it proves impractical. Shared relationship schemas are thus a source of creativity and constraint. I show that understanding this dialectic accounts for several puzzling features of the diffusion of participatory democratic organizational forms among progressive movements in the late 1960s: notably, that even in the absence of a legitimated model of participatory democracy, activists adopted a similar form of organization, and that, for all their creativity, activists were unable to modify that form to cope with the inequalities it produced.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".