Responding to economic abuse: An institutional logics analysis of feminist activism

Abstract

AbstractEconomic abuse (EA)—intimate partners' efforts to control women's economic resources—still suffers from ambiguous legal recognition. Even in countries with legal recognition, state allocation of resources for support remains meager. We suggest that Israeli state welfare organizations (SWOs) employees have developed their professional response to EA along two distinct value sets—a dominant institutional logic in their respective organizations and a more covert feminist institutional logic encountered in collaborations with feminist Non Governmental Organizations. Using a framework of multiple institutional logics, in interviews with 48 SWO employees, we map the multiple institutional logics that cultivate responses to EA survivors and show that elements of feminist understanding and practices on EA permeate SWOs' practices. The existence of a feminist institutional logic creates a path for exploring whether the feminist impact is significant in enabling committed responses to EA even while no institutional change is achieved.