1.1 Introduction
The aim of this book is to explore opportunities and challenges for the management and governance of hybrid organizations. Although a topical organizational form in contemporary society, with current establishments of corporations designed as benefit corporations (B Corps) or social enterprises (for-profit corporations established with an outspoken purpose to provide charity or take genuine social responsibility), for example, hybrid organizing is not a new phenomenon. The history of corporations with a social engagement is a long one. Cooperative corporations and mutually owned enterprises established to tackle social challenges go way back, to the turn of the nineteenth century, or earlier. During the twentieth century, we have moreover seen a rise, in many countries around the world, of enterprises owned by states, regions or municipalities—enterprises with an overall purpose of serving society. Thus, organizational hybridity has both a long history and forms a part of the organizational life of different sectors of society. Or, to be more precise, it spans across the ideal-typical borders of these sectors, thanks to the hybridity of these organizations. To explore what it is like to manage and govern in such a multifaceted setting, this edited volume applies a multidisciplinary approach with contributions from scholars of management, economic history and law, as well as sociology, political science and social anthropology. Having this competence on board on the team of authors allows us to draw attention to different dimensions in the analyses, ranging from economic, legal and political aspects and conditions, to cultural and social conditions of hybrid organizations.
This exploration of the variety of hybrid organizing also includes analyses of different types of hybrids, such as cooperatives, and mutual- and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The multidisciplinary approach and variety of case studies collected in particular help to advance our understanding of management and governance of hybrid organization by opening up for discussions on a variety of dimensions of hybridity and examples of hybrid organizations. Special focus is placed on exploration and comparison of what is defined here as “constitutional hybrid organizations”, thus hybrid organizations founded with the explicit purpose of fulfilling their mission by integrating either different institutional orders such as the market, the public sector and civil society, or structural traits from the logics of different ideal-typical organizations such as the business corporation, the public agency and the association.
Although the book gathers scholars from different disciplines and offers a collection of cases covering a range of examples of hybrid organization, the overall research question is the same: how are hybrid organizations managed and governed? We study the development over time of hybrid organizations and how their management teams face and respond to changing institutional conditions in their environment. We analyze the characteristic features of management and governance in different times and discuss how the decisions and actions of managers, boards and others involved in governance can be explained. Taken together, the different hybrid organization cases explored in the book highlight what it means to run organizations that fall in between different institutional orders. Do such situations require special management and governance procedures and competences? The cases illustrate that good judgment to improvise and continuously adjust to different and shifting institutional demands (due to complex arrangements of stakeholders with different interests) constitute a characteristic dimension and competence of sustainable management and governance of hybrid organizations. In the following sections, we describe the volume’s theoretical framework and elaborate more on why we believe that recognition of these kinds of management and governance skills is timely and highly relevant.
1.2 Hybrid Organizing: A Topical Theme with a History
Organizational hybridity is a hot topic today among practitioners and policymakers in the public, private and civil sectors. The corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability movements and the general trend toward “hyper-organization” in recent decades have heightened expectations on organizations to respond to increasingly pluralistic and complex institutional environments (Kraatz and Block 2008; Thornton and Ocasio 2008; Mars and Lounsbury 2009; Bromley and Meyer 2015). In addition, acute social, environmental and economic challenges open “opportunity spaces” for hybrids (Holt and Littlewood 2015). Some sources claim that, as a consequence, the number of hybrids is on the rise (e.g. Haigh et al. 2015). Whether this is actually the case or not, the renewed interest in hybridity of both practitioners and scholars from across disciplines and empirical fields (e.g. Brandsen et al. 2005; Billis 2010; Battilana and Dorado 2010; Pache and Santos 2010; Jay 2013; Pache and Santos 2013; Ebrahim et al. 2014; Battilana and Lee 2014; Mair et al. 2015; Denis et al. 2015) encourages us to identify and better acknowledge already-existing hybridity in organizational life. In essence, and as seen in some of the historical case studies in this volume, hybridity is not a new phenomenon, and organizational conditions and legitimacy-seeking responses to institutional demands and complexity have long been of central theoretical concern to organization scholars (e.g. March and Simon 1958; March 1962; Cyert and March 19631; Meyer and Rowan 1977; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Oliver 1991).
1.2.1 Conceptualizing Hybridity: Beyond Normative Assumptions of Goodness
When comparing basic theory on institutional demands and responses with the growing contemporary literature on hybrids and hybridity, we note a normative stance in many recent studies, where concepts such as “social enterprise”, “social venture” or “social entrepreneurship” are used, and the argument is that the hybrid form per se renders a particular capacity to better handle complex missions and societal challenges. The typical empirical scope of such studies covers relatively recently established microfinance organizations, sustainable food producers and work integration social enterprises (WISEs) that combine aspects of the business and charity forms at their core (Dees 2001; Aiken 2006; Mars and Lounsbury 2009; Battilana and Dorado 2010; Mair 2010; Grassl 2011; Ebrahim et al. 2014; Battilana and Lee 2014).
Following Greenwood and Freeman (2017), we find that departing from the more neutral concept of “hybrid organization” offers an advantage over more normative concepts such as “social enterprise”. This is because the concept of hybrid organization encourages critical analysis of possible ethical and social impacts (among others) of the hybrid, without taking them for granted a priori. That is, organizational hybridity is not a guarantee of good outcomes.
Furthermore, and as rightly pointed out by Doherty et al. (2014), as hybridity is increasingly seen as a normal aspect of organizational life, one may question the analytical usefulness of the hybridity concept. What does the concept offer if all organizations are perceived as hybrids? One fruitful trajectory, also suggested by Doherty et al. (2014), is to leave the common analytical design of comparing hybrids to non-hybrids behind (due to the difficulty of defining an organization as a non-hybrid these days) to enable a more exacting exploration of the many interesting differences between organizations characterized by varying types and degrees of hybridity. This is the route taken in this volume.
1.2.2 Constitutional Hybridity: Combinations of Institutional Logics and Traits of Character
Following Mair et al. (2015), hybrid organizations are generally characterized by three attributes: (1) a variety of stakeholders, (2) the pursuit of multiple and often conflicting goals and (3) engagement in diverse or inconsistent activities. Although critics of the usefulness of theorizing on organizational hybridity may say that these are characteristics of most organizations, the hybrid organization literature highlights that these attributes are more pronounced in some types of organizations than in others. Though, admittedly, it remains a general and relatively vague definition of organizational hybridity.
Although the conceptual vagueness of organizational hybridity has no doubt contributed to its popularity in recent years, there has been an unfortunate overuse of the concept, which risks diluting its analytical value. In the earlier literature, many scholars de...