Decision Making in a Hybrid Organization: A Case Study of a Southwestern Drug Court Treatment Program

Abstract

This article presents a case study of decision making in a drug court located the southwestern United States. This study seeks to fill a gap in research on decision making by attending to the ways that drug court officials navigate the demands of a court that is dedicated to both therapy and criminal justice. This analysis differs from previous research by viewing the drug court as a "hybrid organization" and asking how the staff members interact in the decision-making process. Additionally, this research provides an opportunity to investigate the concerns over collaborative decision making raised by critics. The data from this case study reveal that as a hybrid organization, the drug court staff often divides along institutional lines by allowing the counseling staff to manage treatment and the judge to manage punishment. When tensions arise, they are resolved by the structure of the court, which is hierarchical rather than collaborative.

The War on Drugs Comes to the Pharmacy Counter: Frontline Work in the Shadow of Discrepant Institutional Logics

“…Individuals emerge in this study as a key site of institutional competition, a position they have rarely received adequate credit for in the institutional and socio‐legal literature. Past studies primarily demonstrate how institutional competition is resolved at the organizational level through an intra‐organizational or inter‐individual division of labor whereby those who adhere to different logics take on different roles in the organization (Nelson and Nielsen 2000; Reay and Hinings 2009; Dunn and Jones 2010; Castellano 2011; Baker 2012) or negotiate institutional problems as organizational ones (Heimer 1999; Binder 2007). However, these tactics are unavailable to individual workers who face competing institutional demands, requiring them to engage in other processes, such as those demonstrated here.…”

The Family Framework in a Drug Treatment Court

“…Scholars have noted that this mode of intervention relies on relationships between drug court professionals and clients that are like those between parents and children. In her study of decision-making processes in a drug court, Baker (2013) found that relations in the court are not as collaborative as the "team" metaphor suggests. Instead, she likened the relationships among professionals to those characterizing the patriarchal family.…”

The Politics of Benchcraft: The Role of Judges in Mental Health Courts

“…Research on drug courts has found that judges routinely use “tough love” (Burns and Peyrot 2003) jail sanctions, also called shock incarceration or flash incarceration , for clients who fail to conform to the behavioral expectations of the program (Nolan 2001; Griffin, Steadman, and Petrila 2002; Baker 2013). MHC judges, however, are keenly aware that using incarceration as a “brute force” (Kleiman 2009) response to program noncompliance is not always a necessary or even morally appropriate way to advance the court's objectives for persons with severe mental illnesses.…”

“…The first lesson we can learn from this study is that while most sociological studies of PSCs explore how justices grapple with the opposing logics of treatment and punishment to advance the court's objectives (see Burns and Peryot 2003, 2008; Paik 2011; Baker 2013; Lyons 2013), the construct of benchcraft allows scholars to move beyond the “carrot and stick” approach to program compliance, and focus on other dimensions of judicial behavior in MHCs. Specifically, the data reveal that judges engage in a kind of bricolage (Levi-Strauss [1962] 1966).…”