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This study aims to illustrate how white supremacy culture can be produced within nonprofit organizations with a mandate to serve marginalized communities and provide practical suggestions for preventing oppression.

The site of inquiry was a nonprofit organization in south central Texas that provides social support to queer and trans youth. Through critical ethnography, the researchers evaluated the organization's processes and structure (including hierarchy, decision-making, fundraising and interactions between leaders, partners and affected groups) to explore how the organization perpetuated attributes of white supremacy culture.

Data reveal that the organization alienates the youth, volunteers and employees through defensiveness, fear of open conflict, paternalism, perfectionism and power-hoarding.

A dearth of research focuses on how white supremacy culture manifests in organizations serving marginalized communities. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on a nonprofit organization in central Texas that supports queer and trans youth. The authors offer recommendations for addressing white supremacy culture in organizations and suggest future research opportunities.

We contribute to the literature on institutional and organizational change by integrating two related areas of study: the theory and methods of analysis informed by the research on institutional logics and historical-event sequencing. Institutional logics provide the theory to understand how the content of culture influences organizational change; historical-event sequencing reveals the underlying patterns of cultural transformation. We apply this dual perspective to the cases of institutional stability and change in organizational governance in three industries: accounting, architecture, and higher-education publishing. Research on governance has focused on changes in organizational design between markets, hierarchies, and networks. Missing from this research is an understanding of how institutions at the wider societal level motivate organizations to adopt one of these governance forms over another. We examine how the governance of firms in these industries has been influenced by the institutional logics of the professions, the market, the state, and the corporation by focusing on three mechanisms – institutional entrepreneurs, structural overlap, and historical-event sequencing. Overall, our findings reveal how accounting was influenced by state regulation producing a punctuated equilibrium model, architecture by professional duality producing a cyclical model, and publishing by market rationalization producing an evolutionary model of institutional change in organizational governance.

The cultural industries consist of those organizations that design, produce, and distribute products that appeal to aesthetic or expressive tastes more than to the utilitarian aspects of customer needs such as films, books, building designs, fashion, and music (Peterson & Berger, 1975, 1996; Hirsch, 1972, 2000; Lampel, Lant, & Shamsie, 2000). Less widely acknowledged, but as critical, cultural industries also create products that serve important symbolic functions such as capturing, refracting, and legitimating societal knowledge and values. For example, educational publishers influence what concepts and theories are promoted to students by the books they publish. Architects shape the sensibilities of interactions at work, home, and play by their choice of technologies, space design, and material resources. Music producers discover and promote vocal artists whose lyrics shape our understandings of age, gender, and ethnicity. Because of the societal impact of these symbolic functions, cultural industries have continued to interest both popular writers and sociologists alike.

We propose that the ambiguity of discourse around a category – rather than being problematic – improves the longevity of that category. This is especially true in the creative industries. Using methods and theories drawn from sociology and art history, we tested this thesis using swing as a case study. Based on three years of archival research we found 70 co-existing definitions of swing and 89 different uses of the term. These multiple meanings enabled various understandings to come in and out of focus over time, contributing to swing’s longevity. Our findings extend to other categories within the creative industries.

This study explores how creative leadership unfolds in the pursuit of social purpose. Drawing on the case of an architectural firm’s development of novel social housing model, we identify claims of three creative leadership processes and of scaling up for social impact. The study expands the conceptualization of creative leadership to the context of social change. It also adds to the understanding of creative industries by suggesting social purpose as a distinctive, yet underexplored driver of innovation and a source of different balancing act, as well as an important frontier for research on and practice in the creative industries.