Public Service Organizations and Institutional Pluralism: How Structural Filtering Generates Inequality in Client Service and Complicates Mission Fulfillment

Public service organizations (PSOs) in the United States are mission-driven entities that reflect American commitments to democratic opportunity. They also are emblematic “institutionalized organizations” whose legitimacy and success depend on isomorphism with rules or “logics” of their institutional environment. Given the complex, pluralistic nature of PSOs’ institutional environment, what determines whether organizational actors can prioritize logics aligned with American opportunity? And if they cannot, what are the consequences—both for their clients’ organizational experiences and for the broader imperative of mission fulfillment? In this paper, we answer these questions using the case of public U.S. higher education, drawing on unique interview data gathered from organizational actors and their clients (here, students). We find that internal structural attributes—including role specialization, task standardization, and centralization of resource-based decision making—and the related process of structural filtering, centrally drive organizational actors’ logic prioritization and in turn, profoundly impact the character of client interactions and mission fulfillment. Specifically, when structural filtering prevents organizational actors from prioritizing democratic logics, student experiences decline in quality and become more unequal: patterns misaligned with mission fulfillment. We conclude by discussing implications for the organizational production of inequality and for public trust in PSOs.