ABSTRACT
There is a growing acknowledgement that organizations comprise a plurality of concerns and interests. Among community-based organizations, such plurality has been studied as so many tensions that impede work and that must be resolved. In contrast to such a view, we adopt the posture that the multiplicity of voices is something that organizational members, as individuals, actively and reflexively enact. Our study looks at such enactment in the context of the Women's Health Project, a community-based participatory research project focused on health promotion in a racially and ethnically diverse urban population center. More specifically, we study how peer health advocates (i.e., women from the district hired and trained to disseminate health information to their fellow residents) utter multiples voices (including by a single person) and interactionally manage them. We then observe the organizing effects that stem from three processes they enact: deploying alternative identities, transposing practices, and melding voices. We conclude by noting how these processes allow the peers to discursively bridge between the world of the clinic and their neighbourhood world and enable the Project to balance cultural competency with fidelity to health information.
