Inside the hybrid organization: An organizational level view of responses to conflicting institutional demands

Anne-Claire Pache () and Filipe Santos ()
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Anne-Claire Pache: ESSEC Business School, Postal: Avenue Bernard Hirsch - B.P. 50105, 95021 CERGY PONTOISE Cedex, FRANCE, http://www.essec.edu
Filipe Santos: INSEAD, Postal: Boulevard de Constance, 77305 Fontainebleau Cedex

No WP1101, ESSEC Working Papers from ESSEC Research Center, ESSEC Business School

Abstract: This paper explores organizational responses to conflicting institutional demands. An inductive comparative case study of four social enterprises that scaled their organization while mbedded in competing social welfare and commercial logics suggests that, when facing competing organizational templates imposed by their institutional environment, organizations attempt to strike a balance at the organizational level by adopting a combination of intact practices from both logics instead of balancing at the practice level by resorting to strategies such as decoupling. In addition, we find an important legitimating effect of founding origins: in a sector where the social welfare logic is ultimately predominant, organizations originating from the social sector benefited from an a priori legitimacy capital, which allowed them to borrow freely from both social and commercial practices. In contrast, organizations emanating from the commercial sector, suffering from an a priori legitimacy deficit, had to display their conformity with social templates in order to secure their acceptance in the field and therefore adopted predominantly social practices. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of hybrid organizations and point to the founding origins of organizations as an important determinant of the pattern of hybridization strategies.

Keywords: enterprise (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 64 pages
Date: 2011-02-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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