Doctoral Dissertation Research: Blending Commerce and Community: Feminist Bookstores and the Negotiation of Hybrid Identity

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Feminist bookstores, whose ideological commitments often complicate their struggles to survive as small-businesses, exemplify organizations with hybrid identities. They embrace multiple, incongruous identities that are based on competing institutional logics. Rather than adhering to an institutional logic that is either fully efficiency-based or fully value-based, they actively work to balance the two. How do they negotiate these competing logics? Do these negotiations and their outcomes change depending on the life-cycle stage of an organization or of the organizational fields in which a bookstore is embedded? To answer these questions, I draw on multiple methods and data sources. First, I conduct qualitative content analysis with issues of Feminist Bookstore News (the trade journal published from 1976-2000) and materials from the Feminist Bookstore News archives located at the San Francisco Public Library. These historical data allows me to trace discourse regarding organizational identity negotiation. Second, I use semi-structured interviews with feminist bookstore owners, employees, and customers to investigate further the processes and results of such negotiations. Finally, in order to provide detailed illustrations of emerging patterns, I construct in-depth case studies of three feminist bookstores (located in California, Michigan, and Georgia), using archival materials, semi-structured interviews, observation, and customer surveys. The broader impacts of this research include contributions to the field of sociology by an illumination of mechanisms through which identity-hybrid organizations negotiate competing logics, a focus on ongoing negotiations rather than those that take place during organizational disruption, and an analysis of how such strategies change depending on the organization's life-cycle stage. The findings hold practical relevance for the many organizations that hold multiple identities, including those feminist bookstores still in existence. As the first longitudinal study of the organizational field of feminist bookstores, my research also offers a comprehensive look at an organizational field dedicated to women's issues, with particular emphasis on lesbians and women of color.