“We Help Who HUD Tells Us to Help”: Epistemology and Agency at Two Nonprofit Organizations

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that discussions of organizational agency should be first grounded in epistemology. I examine this by comparing the organizing practices of two homeless shelters for women in the same geographic area. While both shelters face many of the same challenges, their differing epistemic frameworks lead to them conceiving of their agency in different ways. For one shelter, a neoliberal epistemic framework leads to the equating of financial resources with agency. At the other anarchist shelter, agency is conceptualized in terms of flexibility and the capacity to respond to individual needs.