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achieved so much influence within the relevant policy domains when they started so far outside
of them? One could simply suggest that the state’s response was slow, but inevitable, and that the
community groups were merely a little ahead of the curve. This seems unlikely considering the
extent of changes in community outreach and education, epidemiology, drug testing, insurance
subsidies, and even the war on drugs. Each of these practices required organizational changes in
established institutions in public health, policy, research and law enforcement. And each of them
involved new and sometimes extraordinary partnerships between government agencies and
private nonprofit community groups.
HIV/AIDS-related NPOs collectively defined a variety of locations with regard to the
state before formalizing a single system of relations. In order to understand this relationship, it
has been necessary to consider how the field developed. The sequence of forms of work adopted
by NPOs revealed the ongoing negotiations among participants over identity, goals and priorities
of the organized community. This negotiation process indicates that discrete organizational
strategies depend on both the structure of organizational fields at the collective level and the
configuration of relations between fields and their environments. Their interdependencies
demonstrate why private organizations in a policy domain may seek to work both with and
against the state and how they are able to do both.
Convention