Unpacking Hybrid Organizing in a Born Green Entrepreneurial Company

The role green businesses can play in a transition to a more sustainable society is an emergent area of questioning that has attracted the attention of both environmental and business academics. Different disciplines have contributed to a growing base of literature, yet a few key gaps exist, such as how green companies balance economic and environmental concerns and how green businesses operate as hybrid organizations. Utilizing ethnographic tools including observations and semi-structured interviews, this study closely analyses a born green company. The study attempts to identify how the green entrepreneurial company creates and captures environmental, economic, and social value as well as how these three types of value are interrelated. The study refrains from economic quantification of environmental and social value, instead focusing on identifiable instances of value creation and capture. This is conducted out of a recognition of non-substitutability concerns to give equal footing to different forms of value, therefore, avoiding some of the economic biases present in previous research. It is suggested that environmental and economic value can have a complementing or competing relationship depending on how the business uses its resources. A four-stage model is proposed, highlighting how this reflexive and dynamic relationship can influence firm performance. The potential benefits of social value creation by green businesses are identified as an overlooked and under-researched area that could have a significant impact on firm performance. Built on the nexus of hybrid organizations and green entrepreneurship, this study contributes to theory and practice by unpacking hybrid ways of creating and capturing value.

“CLIMATE JUSTICE IS RACIAL JUSTICE”: THE YOUTH CLIMATE MOVEMENT AND INTERSECTIONAL MEDIA ORGANIZING IN AN ALGORITHMIC SOCIETY

Before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, the world saw unprecedented levels of youth mobilization. From Black Lives Matter to March for Our Lives to the Youth Climate Strikes, the past decade saw young people leveraging social media to build movements around the world. Existing studies have shown how young people use social media to build movements in liberal democracies under the conditions of free assembly and association. However, since the global pandemic hit, young people (and others) have had to face various constraints to street mobilization. During the pandemic, as youth movements come to depend heavily on digital tools for organizing, social media platforms and algorithms may further complicate the process by which young people’s exercise political power. Using the broader youth climate movement as a case study, I examine how youth movements shift their tactics in response to the pandemic, and what the implications of shifting to the digital space are for the youth climate movement. This study draws on in-depth interviews with youth climate activists, along with digital ethnography and surveys, conducted between 2019 and 2021. Findings show that young climate organizers galvanized social media to shift to remote and hybrid organizing tactics. At the same time, inequalities introduced by social media platforms and algorithms became more acute for the youth movement.

Organizational Hybridity

In many ways, research on organizational hybridity seeks to understand how some organizations mix together elements analytically considered opposed to or in tension with one another. Scholars of organizational hybridity have studied how such unconventional mixing of organizational elements is possible, how this impacts organizational functioning, and how it shapes organizational relations to various internal and external stakeholders. Since the mid-1980s, organizational scholars have used a range of theoretical lenses to shed light on these overarching questions posed by organizational hybridity. Each lens with its unique conceptual tools and assumptions has focused on distinct, yet often connected, aspects of organizational hybridity. For example, organizational forms research has emphasized questions concerning the emergence of hybrid organizations. Identity and institutional logics research has focused on tensions between the distinct elements of hybrids. Categories research has primarily investigated external evaluations of hybridity. Publication activity within different theoretical lenses has varied over time. While much work on organizational hybridity early on used organizational form lenses, more work from an identity perspective followed, and recently institutional logics has offered a much-used meta-theory in hybridity research. Along with the waxing and waning popularity of theoretical lenses over time, a shift has occurred from primarily considering hybrid organizations to attending to hybrid organizing. That is, while early work conceived of organizational hybridity as a matter of type (effectively suggesting differences between hybrids and nonhybrids), more recent work understands hybridity as a matter of degree (some organizations have more while others have less hybrid characteristics). Notwithstanding some cross-fertilization between theoretical lenses and overlaps, different streams of hybridity research have developed in parallel. As such, organizational hybridity as a concept has been (and continues to be) used in different ways in the literature. The aim here is to offer useful resources to navigate the burgeoning literature on organizational hybridity. While necessarily painting the literature with a broad brush, this article offers brief introductions to specific research streams. It lists key references in each section that will allow readers to further pursue each stream. Although varied empirical contexts and theories have been and continue to be pertinent to organizational hybridity research, work on social enterprise and from institutional theory lenses has been particularly vibrant in the recent expansion of the field. This article acknowledges and follows this trend in the literature.

Toward a Discursive Approach to the Hybridization of Practice: Insights from the Case of Servitization in France

Hybrid practices incorporate conflicting institutional logics and are recognized for their capacity to cope with societal problems. Previous literature has concentrated on the hybridization mechanisms inherent in organizations. This focus on an entity has diverted attention away from equivalent mechanisms that operate in wider social systems – specifically, in organizational fields. In this article, I show how discourses can enable such mechanisms. To that end, descending hierarchical classifications were performed on media outlets to study the discourse on the emergence of servitization in France. The results reveal two original mechanisms enabled by discourses and supporting the hybridization of the practice under study: (1) practice renaming and (2) the pivotal role played by the institutional logic of environmental protection. Based on these results, I propose a model detailing how institutional logics and discourses interact to bring about a hybrid practice. This model offers original insights to develop knowledge on hybrid organizing and promote practices that realign business goals with those associated with social welfare and preservation of the natural environment.

Serving the Vulnerable While Being Vulnerable: Organizing Resilience in a Social Welfare Sector

The interplay between formal organizing structures and the informal social networks of employees and organizations furthers the resilience of nonprofit organizations that serve the community. This case study draws on qualitative multi-pronged data collected in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey from two faith networks of social welfare organizations serving the vulnerable in Houston, Texas. Results show that hybrid organizing of formal structures and informal networks contributes to organizational and community resilience. By examining both forms of organizing, this article shows how formal structures offer foundational support to the more informal and nimble social networks across the interorganizational partnerships that support the community. As such, this study extends the process orientation toward resilience by documenting how individuals, organizations, and networks expand organizational internal capacities through disaster relief efforts enacted across levels (employee–organization–community).

Social Enterprises as Hybrid Organisations

Social enterprises are organizations that seek to achieve social goals through innovative and social value-creating activities. However, besides their social objectives, they are confronting financial and resource-based challenges in the markets to provide their sustainability. The tension between these dual objectives leads organizations to focus on one of the strategies value-creating or value capture. However, in recent years, hybrid organizing is seen as an alternative way of balancing dual objectives. Thus this study aims to understand how hybrid social enterprises perform well and create social impact. A qualitative descriptive single case study approach will be used to analyze a hybrid organization and its consequences.

Legitimation of Social Enterprises as Hybrid Organizations

On the basis of an inductive multiple case study of ten social enterprises, we explore how social enterprises, which incorporate for-profit and not-for-profit logics as a hybrid form, gain legitimacy. Our analysis suggests the existence of three types of social entrepreneurs’ hybrid identities and shows how these hybrid identities systematically shape legitimation patterns of social enterprises. Furthermore, our findings suggest that social enterprises’ organizational types as hybrids also determine their legitimation patterns. These findings theoretically contribute to the research on hybrid organizing, legitimation of new ventures, and social entrepreneurship.