Shifting Organizational Power: The Role of Structures and Resource Models

This paper examines organizational attempts to redistribute power resulting from a change in resource flows from organizational to individualized resource acquisition. Drawing on a comparative case study of two university departments within STEM that experienced a significant influx in external funding, we make three contributions. First, we draw attention to the role of resources in debates about the concentration and redistribution of power. Second, we illustrate how power was redistributed through processes of changing, in tandem, resource redistribution models and organizational structures. Our study shows that, in one case, the bundling of a resource redistribution model with strengthened formal structures led to the decentralization of power and encompassing power relations within which both management and resource holders were enabled (Barrett Cox, 2021). In the other case, the bundling of a resource distribution model with a dissolution of organizational structures surprisingly led to a centralization of power and asymmetric power relations. Third, we explicate the role of power in literature on organizational structures and nuance prevailing notions of centralization of power as an outcome of formalized structures.