Navigating Contested Spaces: Strategic Action Field Analyses of Challenges and Possibilities for Addressing Intimate Partner Violence and Problems with Alcohol/Other Drugs Together

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and problems with Alcohol/Other Drugs (AOD) are frequently intertwined, with studies showing that 25 to 70 % of people affected by one are also affected by the other. Each is a stigmatized condition; many costly societal, family, and personal consequences are associated with each separately, and are more severe when both are present. IPV and AOD are rarely addressed in coordinated ways, within communities, human services, or social policy, despite growing evidence that doing so reduces barriers to change and improves outcomes. Separate intervention fields for IPV and AOD exist, with different origins, histories, conceptual paradigms, and organizational forms as well as significant controversies within each field. Both fields are gendered, but differently. Practitioners report many conflicts/problems in working across fields and creating “hybrid” approaches (addressing IPV and AOD together in ways appropriate for particular people, circumstances, settings and communities).

This paper presents data from a mixed methods study of practitioners and organizations endeavoring to address both IPV and AOD together when most do not (survey, N-211, 36 organizational case studies, 14 comparative case study databases). We employ frameworks from Strategic Action Fields (Fligstein & McAdam, 2011) applied/expanded by Evans & Kay (2008) to conditions of field overlap, Goldstone & Useem (2012) emphasizing organizational differences, values and norms, Skelcher & Smith’s (2015) work on organizational hybridity, and Bourdieu on field theory. Spaces feature predominantly in both barriers and innovations identified: Navigating physical and conceptual spaces between organizations within communities, uses of physical and conceptual spaces within organizations, different types of power (e.g., cultural, economic, social) negotiations within/across organizations and action fields to leverage resources and work to change/bridge paradigms, and also lived experiences of those working to understand and navigate these two fields to produce hybrid organizations/approaches that span older spaces and create new spaces.