Human Service Nonprofits Providing Services to Sex Workers: Efforts to Manage Competing Logics and Ideologies From an Inhabited Institutions Framework

Human service nonprofits (HSNPs) are primarily responsible for addressing prominent social problems such as poverty, homelessness, addiction, and mental health. As such, they vary considerably in their service provision to their marginalized clients. In this paper, I use the theories of institutional logics and inhabited institutions to highlight how individual actors within HSNPs translate different institutional logics in service provision. Using qualitative interviews from 38 HSNP managers working with sex workers, I focus on competing logics and gender ideologies that influence HSNPs. Findings show that despite conflict between different gender ideologies, HSNP employees discover merits in combining logics and ideologies, discovering ways to reinterpret these at the ground level in conjunction with social relationships and interactions in the field. The implications around the role of individual agency and meaning-making in nonprofit dynamics, as well as a reflection upon what this means for HSNPs and their work, is discussed.