Organisational legitimacy beyond ethnicity?: Shifting organisational logics in the struggle for immigrant rights in Los Angeles

Immigrant political organisations in the United States have traditionally built political power by claiming to legitimately represent an ethnically defined group. However, the emergence of a number of multi-ethnic, class-based organisations over the last two decades has challenged this assumption, while raising questions about the ability of the institutional context to accommodate organisational change. Building on a neo-institutional theory of legitimacy, I examine the diverging legitimating strategies employed by two long-standing immigrant organisations based in Los Angeles (LA): the Korean Resource Center (KRC) and the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA). Through grant applications, organisational archival data and qualitative interviews, I show how KRC and KIWA, two groups embedded in the same sociopolitical context, have built unique yet equally successful legitimating accounts by adopting different organisational logics, one broadly based on ethnicity and one on class and multi-ethnicity. I suggest that KIWA and KRC's ideological differences, and their reliance on a different core of supporters - ethnic-oriented for KRC, labour-oriented for KIWA - drove the organisations towards distinct, yet partially overlapping subfields. By discursively mobilising those connections, and by actively shaping the surrounding organisational environment, both KRC and KIWA were able to incorporate in the broader non-profit advocacy sector in LA

Beyond immigrant ethnic politics?:Organizational innovation, collaboration and competition in the Los Angeles immigrant rights movement (1980-2015)

This dissertation explores factors and conditions that shaped the character, success and fragmentation of the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles, California, during the period 1980- 2015. The study focuses on a unique group of LA ‘immigrant worker’ organizations that, through the promotion of class-based solidarities, the development of multi-ethnic alliances and the articulation of an intersectional understanding of immigrants’ subaltern position in US society, not only deviated from conventional patterns of immigrant ethnic politics but also gained significant political prominence. Relying on the analysis of organizational archival material and qualitative interviews with key informants, the chapters of this dissertation identify common organizational innovation, organizational strategic action and inter-organizational resource competition as key factors affecting organizational characteristics as well as dynamics of collaboration and conflict under changing external conditions. More in general, this thesis argues that we can better understand immigrant organizations if we view them as both agents and products of 1) the environment in which they operate and 2) the relations to which they are part. Organizations depend for their survival and success on a wide range of social actors, and this dependence affects internal dimensions such as identity- and goal-definition, as well as claim-making and structures. Yet, unlike many other groups, immigrant organizations are not only embedded in the local context, but also in a transnational space that contributes to shaping their social, political and cultural character. This dual relational aspect helps us understand how organizations can either offset or rather compound the obstacles presented by local hostile political and discursive opportunities

Non-Governmental Organisations and Legitimacy: Authority, Power and Resources

In the analysis of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), legitimacy and legitimation are useful concepts because they bring to light the processes through which organisational entities justify their right to exist and their actions within a particular normative context. Theories of legitimacy underscore the moral basis of organisational power as grounded in the relationship between organisations and different kinds of audiences. In this article, we look at how those concepts and theories relate to the study of NGOs. Those theories not only help us understand how organisations establish themselves, strengthen their position and survive over time despite very limited material resources of their own, but also how organisations may build political power. In our review of the literature on organisational legitimacy, we focus on three main aspects of legitimacy: the conceptualisation of the term in organisational sociology, political sociology and political science; the constraining role of institutionalised normative contexts and competing audiences in the legitimation processes; the agentic role of organisations within both institutional and strategic contexts