P04 SIG Governing and Managing Hybridity

Panel Chairs

Corresponding chair:

• Jarmo Vakkuri, Professor, Tampere University - jarmo.vakkuri@tuni.fi

Chair for review group:

• Jan-Erik Johanson, Professor, Tampere University - jan-erik.johanson@tuni.fi

Panel co-chairs:

• Marieke van Genugten, Associate professor, Radboud University
• Giuseppe Grossi, Professor, Kristianstad University and Nord University
• Jan-Erik Johanson, Professor, Tampere University
• Philip Marcel Karré, Assistant professor, Erasmus University Rotterdam  
• Mirko Noordegraaf, Professor, University of Utrecht
• Ulf Papenfuß, Professor, Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen
• Jarmo Vakkuri, Professor, Tampere University
• Rómulo Pinheiro, Professor, University of Agder  
• Maria Laura Frigotto, Professor, University of Trento
• Tanja Klenk, Professor, Helmut-Schmidt-University / University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg

Hybridity has become increasingly prominent in public management, blending elements of state, market, and civil society and bringing together multiple logics: business, entrepreneurial, professional, political, and societal. It is evident in organizations, networks, services, policies and governance arrangements that cross institutional boundaries. These hybrids integrate competing rationalities such as bureaucratic control, market efficiency, professional standards and civic engagement, creating both opportunities and tensions.

Scholarly interest in hybrids has expanded, spanning fields such as public administration, management, organizational sociology, economics, accounting, social enterprise, nonprofit studies, political science, and sustainability. The time is ripe to move beyond generic definitions of hybridity and explore how insights from diverse fields can be combined. Rather than treating hybridity as a conceptual endpoint, we should understand it as an evolving research agenda addressing societal issues with significant managerial and practical consequences.

Our Special Interest Group (SIG) is dedicated to advancing understanding of how to govern and manage hybridity, acknowledging both its potential for innovation and collective value creation and inherent risks such as (excessive) ambiguity, accountability gaps, and value conflicts. Acknowledging the broad character and disciplinary roots of hybridity research (Johanson & Vakkuri 2017; Koppenjan, Karré & Termeer, 2019; Billis & Rochester, 2020; Brandsen & Karré, 2021; Besharov & Mitzinneck, 2021), we adopt an inclusive conceptualization of hybridity and invite contributions that examine its diverse manifestations. These include, for example, hybrid organizations and services, such as universities, healthcare and welfare organizations, non-profits and third-sector actors, social enterprises, municipal corporations, and state-owned enterprises that must reconcile conflicting institutional logics to remain financially, socially, and ecologically sustainable.

Hybridity is not confined to organizational types alone. It appears across micro, meso, and macro levels: in networks connecting public agencies, private firms, and civil society actors; in interprofessional collaborations; and in hybrid policy formation and governance arrangements (Vakkuri et al., 2025). Examples include hybridity and hybridization in sustainability policies, circular economy initiatives, national innovation systems, and global air travel, illustrating how hybrid constellations emerge to tackle complex challenges through boundary-spanning value creation and coordination.

We invite conceptual, theoretical, and empirical papers assessing hybrid arrangements in their various manifestations, analysing antecedents, opportunities, tensions and risks. Priority will be given to papers in which hybridity serves as a central analytical lens. We also encourage novel inter-disciplinary perspectives on hybridity across different institutional, organizational, services and professional contexts, as well as in policy, management, evaluation, and accounting. Finally, we welcome applied research, presenting practical, managerial and professional implications (for more details, see https://www.irspm.org/interest-groups/governing-managing-hybridity).

Our SIG values contributions that embrace theoretical pluralism and advance the conceptualization, application, measurement, or practical implications of such perspectives across the following empirical settings:

1. Organizational manifestations of hybridity

• The rise of governance, ownership, and control structures in hybrid organizations (including shared ownership between public and private actors).
• Accounting, performance measurement, and accountability practices and tensions in hybrid organizations, including municipal and state-owned enterprises, quangos, and social enterprises.
• Organizational strategies, value conflicts, and goal incongruence stemming from competing institutional logics.
• Hybrid organizations and service delivery systems under conditions of uncertainty.
• Frameworks for choosing between available institutional logics to guide the practical design of hybrid networks and organizations.
• Effects of hybridity on internal dynamics of hybrid organizations, such as employee attitudes, professional roles, and managerial practices.
• The impact of hybridity on service quality, innovation, and performance outcomes.
• Financial and non-financial control tools in hybrid service delivery.
• Relations with external stakeholders such as regulators, public owners, funders, and civil society.

2. Hybridity in policy formation and hybrid professions

• Polycrisis and turbulence (including climate change, pandemics, wars and migration) as triggers for hybrid policy innovations or institutional change.
• Hybridity shaping collaborative governance arrangements across sectors and professions.
• Hybridity in policy making; public ‘policy mixes’ in competing and contrasting value constellations in e.g. safety and security policy.
• Interactions between hybridity and resilience in health, welfare, local government, (higher) education and critical infrastructure policies.
• Digital transformation and artificial intelligence as an enabler of new hybrid interactions between citizens, governments, and businesses.
• Co-regulation and new regulatory practices in governing hybridity in society.
• Employee sense-making, role conflict, and identity formation in hybrid settings.
• Tensions between professional norms and organizational imperatives in hybrid roles.
• Professional strategies to navigate ambiguity, and multiple accountability demands.

3. Methodological challenges and advancements in hybridity research

• Innovative uses of mixed methods to capture complexity in hybrid organizations.
• Quantitative approaches to measuring hybridity, goal alignment, or stakeholder influence.
• New qualitative strategies (including narrative methods, discourse analysis, ethnography) to uncover lived experiences of hybridity.
• Configurational methods (including QCA) for examining causal complexity and institutional variety.
• Methodological reflections on researching in-between hybridity spaces and ambiguous organizational boundaries.