Hybridising Housing Organisations

Meanings, Concepts and Processes of Social Enterprise in Housing

David Mullins, Darinka Czischke, Gerard Van Bortel, David Mullins, Darinka Czischke, Gerard Van Bortel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138377325
• eBook ISBN: 9781134908134
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Social housing has long been delivered through mixed economy mechanisms, but there has been little focus in housing studies on what this means for housing organisations themselves. This book presents recent international research applying concepts of social enterprise and hybridity to illuminate organisational behaviour in the housing sector. It addresses critiques of the explanatory value of these concepts by exploring their underlying meanings and their application to diverse case studies worldwide. The concepts are found to be most useful where they inform dynamic analysis of hybridisation and identify underlying change mechanisms, rather than simply providing static descriptions of hybridity. Various chapters in the book show how analysis can be enriched by drawing on institutional theory to develop concepts such as competing organisational logics, trade-offs between social and commercial goals and resource transfers. The Book also looks at policy as a driver for hybridisation and to the regulatory challenges for policy systems that have come to rely on hybrid forms of delivery. A research agenda is proposed building on these conceptual frameworks to develop systematic approaches to data collection and analysis to enable clearer and more consistent meanings to emerge.

This book was published as a special issue of Housing Studies.

INTRODUCTION

Exploring the Meaning of Hybridity and Social Enterprise in Housing Organisations*

DAVID MULLINS**, DARINKA CZISCHKE^† & GERARD VAN BORTEL^‡

**Third Sector Research Centre, University of Birmingham, ^†Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, ^‡OTB, Delft University of Technology

ABSTRACT While social housing has long been delivered through mixed economy mechanisms, there has been little focus in housing studies on what this means for housing organisations. This paper reviews recent international work applying concepts of social enterprise and hybridity to illuminate organisational behaviour. It addresses critiques of the explanatory value of these concepts by exploring their underlying meanings and their application to diverse case studies worldwide. The concepts are found to be most useful where they inform dynamic analysis of hybridisation and identify underlying change mechanisms, rather than simply providing static descriptions of hybridity. Analysis can be enriched by drawing on institutional theory to develop concepts such as competing organisational logics, trade-offs between social and commercial goals and resource transfers. The paper looks at policy as a driver for hybridisation and to the regulatory challenges for policy systems that have come to rely on hybrid forms of delivery. A research agenda is proposed building on these conceptual frameworks to develop systematic approaches to data collection and analysis to enable clearer and more consistent meanings to emerge.

Introduction

‘it is not just the economy but also the organisations themselves that have become mixed’ (Billis, 2010, p. 12)

David Billis neatly summarises a theme that has engaged the interest of a working group of the European Network for Housing Research¹ for a number of years. While the mixed economy of welfare (Powell, 2007) had become an increasingly taken-for-granted outcome of state retreat, privatisation and commissioning of public services from third sector organisations, very little attention seemed to have been paid within housing studies to the implications of this mixing for housing organisations. The European Network of Housing Research (ENHR) working group on ‘Social Housing: Institutions, Organisations and Governance’ has since 2002 taken a broad interest in change in the social housing sector in Europe, and has explored these issues from a number of perspectives including network and systems theories (Mullins & Rhodes, 2007), marketisation and the introduction of new actors into social housing (Rhodes & Mullins, 2009) and network governance in urban regeneration (Van Bortel et al., 2009). Moreover, the working group became increasingly interested in tensions emerging within housing organisations as a result of their blending of market and social goals and mechanisms. Work by Gruis (2008) on the tensions between social and commercial goals in Dutch housing associations and Mullins & Pawson (2010) on hybridity in the English housing sector provided a bridge to the wider literature on social enterprise and hybridity. In this study, we set out to explore the meaning of hybridity and social enterprise in housing organisations by considering how these concepts have been applied in recent studies of different national, sector and organisational contexts.

While increasing rapidly, the literature on social enterprise (see for example Crossan et al., 2003; Dees, 1998; Defourny, 2001; Evers & Laville, 2004; Kerlin, 2006; Lyon & Sepulveda, 2009; Peattie & Morley, 2008; Teasdale, 2011) and on hybridity (see for example Anheier, 2011; Billis, 2010; Brandsen et al., 2005; Evers, 2005; Koppell, 2001; Osborne, 2005; Skelcher, 2004, 2005) has to date provided very few accounts of hybrid models in housing, despite their apparent prevalence in policy and practice. Notable exceptions are Teasdale’s (2009, 2010) work on social enterprise models in the homelessness sector and Buckingham’s (2009, 2011) work on homelessness support organisations in England. US exceptions include Kopell’s (2001) early case studies of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in relation to housing finance and Smith’s (2010) inclusion of housing in wider work of hybridisation of governance of non-profit organisations. Meanwhile, Blessing has recently provided a theoretically informed account of hybridity and the role of not-for-profit social entrepreneurs as ‘magical or monstrous’ in the housing market in the Netherlands and Australia (Blessing, 2012, p. 189). The time therefore seemed right for a special issue on social enterprise and hybridity in housing, and we were delighted to receive support from the Housing Studies editorial board for such a proposal.

The result has been an interesting and eventful journey over a two-year period including workshops at two ENHR Conferences in Istanbul in 2010, when some of the papers published here first appeared, and in Toulouse in 2011, when more developed versions of the former papers were subjected to lively discussion and debate both within the workshop and in a special plenary session of the conference. The plenary contributed to our broader aim of drawing attention of the wider body of housing studies scholars to this often overlooked dimension of change in the ways in which housing and community needs are being addressed by new organisational forms and what the concepts of hybridity and social enterprise might mean in these emerging contexts.

This special issue takes this agenda on to the next level by providing an overview of recent international work on social enterprise and hybridity in housing and proposing a future research agenda. We hope that this will provide the stimulus for more scholars to enter this field and to address some of the continued gaps and outstanding questions that endure. We must also remain aware of the critique, that we encountered at times in the referring process, that hybridity is ‘a concept that is widely used but seems to play no useful function in theory building or advice to policy-makers’ (Skelcher, 2012). Thus, the mere imposition of concepts of hybridity or social enterprise onto empirical investigations may add little to understanding unless they clarify and adequately theorise tensions that would otherwise have been opaque.

The quest for meaning must, of course, start with some attempts at definition. However as another paper in this special issue notes (Czischke et al., pp. 418–437) ‘definitions of social enterprise have varied considerably between jurisdictions, and have often been policy dependent rather than subject to more scientific definitions’. Moreover, there has been a reluctance in some places to use the term at all in relation to housing landlord organisations even where they are separate from government, trading for a social purpose and appear to meet policy definitions applied to other fields.

Nevertheless, a minimum definition of social enterprise provided by the UK Department of Trade and Industry of organisations that ‘trade for social purpose’ (DTI, 2002) appears to have wide currency internationally. Indeed, there is a degree of consensus even across the European and North American divide (Kerlin, 2006) that social enterprise involves the use of non-governmental, market-based approaches to address social issues (Peattie & Morley, 2008). In the USA, the concept remains very broad and dominated by revenue generation in response to government funding cuts (Dees, 1998). Meanwhile in Europe the meaning tends to be more specific, associated with cooperative forms of organisation and is often underpinned by legislation (Defourny, 2009).

Hybridity can be an even more elusive term to pin down, since it often has multiple meanings. The complex nature of hybrid organisations is recognised in Anheier’s (2011) view that a necessary condition of hybridity is the presence of relatively persistent multiple stakeholder configurations. Similarly, Billis refers to hybrid organisations as possessing ‘significant’ characteristics of more than one sector (public, private and third) (Billis, 2010:p. 3). This definition is valuable since it also embraces private sector organisations with a strong social orientation. However, Billis’ core interest is in hybrid organisations that have ‘roots’ and therefore primarily adhere to the ‘distinctive principles of just one sector’ (ibid, p. 3), and in particular to third sector hybrids and their departure from the ‘pure form’ of the voluntary association.

Other forms of hybridity that are relevant to understanding change in housing organisations include hybrid financial dependencies (mixing state and market funding), hybrid governance structures (reflecting stakeholder mix or separating charitable and commercial activities) and hybrid products and services (combining housing with social and neighbourhood support services). In the social housing context, therefore, Mullins & Pawson (2010) discuss hybridity in English and Dutch housing associations in relation to ‘finance, governance, structure and activities’ and contrast views of hybrids as ‘for profits in disguise or as agents of policy’ (2010, p. 197). Meanwhile, Blessing considers ‘hybrid’ status to imply ‘spanning state and market, combining public and private action logics, and subject to multiple sets of institutional conditions’ (Blessing, 2012, p.190). Her account of hybridity in the Dutch and Australian rental housing markets conceptualises hybridity alternatively as ‘a state of transformation’, as providing ‘links between cultures’, ‘hybrid vigour’ and ‘magical solutions’, and as ‘transgressing binary divides’ between state and market. She concludes that ‘social entrepreneurship is not a super-blend, but a balancing act’ (Blessing, 2012, p. 205), involving compromises and trade-offs between competing institutional rules and norms.

Key Questions for the Special Issue

The call for papers for this special issue required authors to connect housing studies with the theoretical literature on social enterprise and hybridity and to draw out their relevance for social housing organisations, particularly those that are organisationally separate from government and that are to a degree trading for a social purpose.

Drawing on prior research on gaps in our knowledge on social enterprise and hybridity in the housing sector and our quest for meaning, we identified the following questions which we hoped that the contributions would address:

● How useful are models of social enterprise and hybridity for the analysis of organisational behaviour in the housing sector in different contexts?

● How and to what extent do housing organisations engage with debates about social enterprise and hybridity?

● How do they position themselves vis-à-vis the state, the market and society?

● How do they reconcile conflicting logics of ‘common good’, financial return and government policy?

● How do these conflicting logics play out in housing policy and implementation in different national and local contexts?

● What are the policy implications of the growth in social enterprise and hybridity?

Contributions

Geographical and Sector Coverage

With the encouragement of the Housing Studies editorial board, we invited contributions from a broader base than the European social housing context that had stimulated our initial interest in social enterprise and hybridity. We are delighted to include in this special issue two contributions from the USA, one focusing on the non-profit housing sector (Bratt, pp. 438–456) and one looking at the emergence of increasingly hybrid forms in the public housing sector (Ngyuen & Rohe, pp. 457–475). We have two papers from the Asia Pacific region, one exploring the nature of hybridity within an expanding and diversifying social housing sector in South Korea (Lee & Ronald, pp. 495–513), the other focused on organisational hybridity in the context of attempts to expand a very small Australian nonprofit housing sector (Gilmour & Milligan, pp. 476–494).

Three European contributions include a comparative perspective (Czischke et al., pp. 418–437), which develops an empirically informed conceptual model for a study of social enterprise being applied in a depth study of housing companies in England, Finland and the Netherlands. The two remaining papers focus on England. Teasdale (pp. 514–532) explores the tensions between social and commercial goals in work integration social enterprises in the homelessness field, while Sacranie (pp. 533–552) provides insights into the enactment of hybridity in different parts of a large geographically dispersed housing association in a phase of post-merger integration.

We believe that these papers provide a useful variety of national and organisational contexts in which to explore the meaning of social enterprise, hybridity and housing but recognise that there is scope for considerable expansion of the coverage offered by this collection and for a wider range of interpretations to be considered.

Models and Concepts

It is clear from the papers presented in this special issue that while existing conceptualisations of social enterprise and hybridity are helpful in understanding the dynamics of change in housing organisations in different contexts, there is scope for their refinement to fit specific contexts and to link with broader theoretical perspectives. Peer reviews have also helped us to consider the extent to which such conceptualisation really adds meaning to existing analyses.

Most of the authors have drawn, to some extent, on existing conceptualisations of social enterprise and hybridity to illuminate case studies of housing organisations. These conceptualisations often take on a graphical form; continua, triangles, pyramids and overlapping circles, as illustrations to the papers that follow confirm. In particular, we see social enterprise depicted as a continuum between state and market forms (see for example Crossan, 2009), with the possibility of organisations moving backwards and forwards along this continuum between traditional and more socially entrepreneurial practices (Stull, 2003). We also see repeatedly the formulation of social enterprises as operating in a force field pulled between the three triangular drivers of state, market and ‘community’ (Brandsen et al., 2005), or in some cases ‘society’ (Gruis, 2008) or in the case of Buckingham’s (2011...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Introduction: Exploring the Meaning of Hybridity and Social Enterprise in Housing Organisations
• 2. Conceptualising Social Enterprise in Housing Organisations
• 3. The Quadruple Bottom Line and Nonprofit Housing Organizations in the United States
• 4. Entrenched Hybridity in Public Housing Agencies in the USA
• 5. Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom: Innovation and Diversity in Australian Not-for-Profit Housing Organisations
• 6. Expansion, Diversification, and Hybridization in Korean Public Housing
• 7. Negotiating Tensions: How Do Social Enterprises in the Homelessness Field Balance Social and Commercial Considerations?
• 8. Hybridity Enacted in a Large English Housing Association: A Tale of Strategy, Culture and Community Investment
• 9. Magical or Monstrous? Hybridity in Social Housing Governance
• Index