Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

8-2016

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph. D.

Department

Sociology

Degree Program

Sociology (Applied), PhD

Committee Chair

Gagne, Patricia

Committee Member

Roelfs, David

Committee Member

Carini, Robert

Committee Member

Marshall, Gul Aldikacti

Committee Member

Zierold, Kristina

Committee Member

Rice, Corrie

Author's Keywords

interagency collaboration; gender; power; child welfare; families; bureaucracy; human services

Abstract

This study incorporated a feminist approach to the use of multiple qualitative methods by conducting participant observation, focus group interviewing, and in-depth interviewing of women and men affiliated with a diverse representation of human service organizations. An applied research partnership with a multi-county human service organization provided entrée to the study population. Through analytic induction using a grounded theoretical approach the study explored perceptions of power, authority, gender, inequality, and bureaucratic constraints that emerged during organizational processes of interagency collaboration among multidisciplinary human service organizations (Charmaz 2014; Corbin and Strauss 2014). Findings indicate that establishing relationships is critical for interagency collaboration to be effective; however, the lived experience of interagency collaboration is that ethics of care and care work are constrained by gendered power dynamics, primarily ethics of justice embedded in bureaucratically-structured human service organizations situated within a plurality of complexities. Further, tensions between bureaucracy and ethics of care are enacted through relative, subjective, and exclusionary forms of gendered and other types of intersectionally-situated bureaucratic power.

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