Homelessness, social relations and institutional logics: property rights without property?

Abstract

We explore whether there is evidence of property rights amongst the homeless, and if so, how these rights are governed. By conducting interviews with 52 homeless people in Cape Town, we show that although the homeless are able to derive some value from assets, and can exclude other members of their community, these rights are precarious and dependent upon state agents not seizing the 'property' and overriding the community's rules of the game. We demonstrate the intersectionality of claims with respect to the same physical property from the varying perspectives of the claimants involved and how this differs depending on the property. Homeless people rely on a community logic to develop rules of the game which results in the appearance of a market logic. In the absence of formal institutions effectively operating in their spaces, they have constituted social norms which provide some semblance of property rights respected intra-group.

Incomplete Institutional Change and the Persistence of Racial Inequality: The Contestation of Institutional Misalignment in South Africa*

“…For actors and organizations, multiple logics may present challenges in how they reconcile these logics and whether it may lead to loss of legitimacy or risk clashes between the blocs embodied by the contradictory logics (Smets et al, 2015; Westermann‐Behaylo et al, 2014). This, in turn, has led to research on combining logics and studying how contradictory logics are managed at an individual and organizational level (Bitektine et al, 2020; Greenwood et al, 2014; Luiz and Rycroft, 2020; Meyer and Höllerer, 2014; Meyer and Vaara, 2020; Patriotta, 2020; Voronov and Weber, 2020).…”

Negotiating new institutional logics

“…In other words, these institutional logics often rely on high levels of intra-community trust but this social capital does not necessarily extend inter-community (Luiz, 2015). Its rationalization, in the Weberian sense, is thereby curtailed (Luiz and Rycroft, 2018).…”