Nonconformance With Regulatory Codes in the Nonprofit Sector: Accountability and the Discursive Coupling of Means and Ends
研究了两家慈善组织如何通过不遵守特定规范来缓解合规与目标实现之间的张力，并探讨了为不合规行为进行解释的过程如何导致手段与目的的话语耦合。
Means–ends decoupling has recently been suggested as one consequence of the problems organizations face in trying to comply with institutional rules in contexts of institutional complexity. Such decoupling is characterized by the adoption, implementation, and scrutiny of particular codes of practice, which tend not to deliver the outcomes they were developed to produce. Recent scholarship focusing on this issue has suggested that such decoupling is a consequence of the trade-off organizations need to make between compliance and goal achievement, most especially when the latter is difficult to evaluate. Although recent scholarship has suggested that this tension might be mitigated by the activities of developers of compliance rules, in this article, we explore how actors internal to organizations, in this case, two charitable organizations, mitigate this tension via nonconformance with particular codes. We focus on how the process of accounting for nonconformance results in the discursive coupling of means and ends as actors creatively develop vocabularies of motive, which respond to anticipated social criticism.