Organizational response to AIDS: The politics of policy-setting

In less than a decade, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) has been diagnosed in over 120,000 Americans; 70,000 have already died. This dissertation examines the organizational response to AIDS in New York City. Based on data collected through 106 focused interviews, participant observation, and written records, it presents narrative historical accounts of the response to AIDS in three fields of organizations: traditional service providers--government agencies and major voluntary organizations; gay Community-Based Organizations (CBOs); and African-American and Latino CBOs.;It suggests that the response to AIDS can be characterized as the failure of the traditional health and social service systems and the reliance on community-based initiatives. While the gay community responded by developing an infrastructure of CBOs and an autonomous AIDS Movement, the minority communities experienced prolonged denial and developed only several small CBOs. This analysis suggests that three concurrent dynamic processes account for the difference in the responses: the historical development of the community prior to the onset of AIDS; the process by which CBOs altered the community structure (successive changes in the field of CBOs and the community structure); and the timing of government intervention in the process of community response to the problem. This analysis of the response to AIDS illuminates problems in the literatures which had sought to universalize the dynamics of collective action and organizational behavior. This analysis suggests that organizational and social movement theories must incorporate a consideration of community structure, community-based resources, and the dynamics of problem definition in the community into analyses of organizational behavior and collective action.