P13 SIG Governing & Managing Hybridity

Panel Member(s) & Contact Details

Corresponding chair: Jarmo Vakkuri, Professor, Tampere University, Finland: jarmo.vakkuri@tuni.fi

Review group chair: Jan-Erik Johanson, Tampere University, Finland: jan-erik.johanson@tuni.fi

Co-Chairs: 

Marieke van Genugten, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Giuseppe Grossi, Kristianstad University and Nord University, Norway

Philip Marcel Karré, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

David Mills, Queensland University of Technology, School of Management, Austtralia

Mirko Noordegraaf, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands

Ulf Papenfuß, Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany

Summary

This panel explores the growing significance of hybridity in public management, where organizations and governance arrangements blend state, market, and civil society logics. It invites interdisciplinary research on hybrid organizations, policies, and professions, emphasizing both their innovative potential and the tensions they create. Contributions should address governance, accountability, digital transformation, and methodological approaches to understanding hybridity across sectors and scales.

Description

Hybridity has emerged as a significant force in public management, blending elements of state, market, and civil society and bringing together multiple logics – businesslike, entrepreneurial, professional, political, societal. It is increasingly evident in the proliferation of 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 in recent years, spanning fields such as public administration, management, organizational sociology, economics, accounting, social enterprise, nonprofit studies, political science, and sustainability. The time is ripe not only to move beyond generic definitions of hybridity, but also to explore how insights from these diverse fields can be brought into dialogue, contrasted, or combined. Rather than treating hybridity as a conceptual end point, we must understand it as an evolving scientific research agenda addressing intricate 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; Vakkuri et al. 2021; Besharov & Mitzinneck, 2021), we adopt an inclusive conceptualization of hybridity and invite contributions that examine its diverse manifestations. These include, for example, the wide range of 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—organizations 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 of societal activity: in networks connecting public agencies, private firms, and civil society actors; in interprofessional collaborations; and in hybrid policy formation and broader governance arrangements. Examples include hybridity and hybridization in sustainability policies, circular economy initiatives, national innovation systems, and global air travel, all of which illustrate 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. We also encourage novel inter-disciplinary perspectives to understanding hybridity in different contexts of institutions, organizations, services and professions, but also policies, management, evaluation, and accounting (for more details, see https://www.irspm.org/interest-groups/governing-managing-hybridity ).

We welcome papers on (but not limited to) the following themes:

1. Organizational manifestations of hybridity

• Governance, ownership, and control structures in hybrid organizations (e.g., shared ownership between public and private actors).
• Accounting, performance measurement, and accountability in hybrid organizations, e.g. municipal and state-owned enterprises, quangos, and social enterprises.
• Organizational strategies, value conflicts, and goal incongruence stemming from competing institutional logics.
• Methods and 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 mechanisms in hybrid service delivery.
• Relationships with external stakeholders such as regulators, public owners, funders, and civil society.

2. Hybridity in policy formation and hybrid professions

• The role of hybridity in shaping collaborative governance across sectors and professions.
• Hybridity in policy making; public ‘policy mixes’ in competing and contrasting value constellations.
• Digital transformation as an enabler of new hybrid interactions between citizens, governments, and businesses.
• Co-regulation and new regulatory practices in governing hybridity in society.
• Crisis and turbulence (e.g. pandemics, climate, migration) as triggers for hybrid innovation or institutional change.
• Employee sense-making, role conflict, and identity formation in hybrid settings.
• Tensions between professional norms and organizational imperatives in hybrid roles.
• Managerial and 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 (e.g., narrative methods, discourse analysis, ethnography) to uncover lived experiences of hybridity.
• Configurational methods (e.g., QCA) for examining causal complexity and institutional variety.
• Methodological reflections on researching in-between spaces and ambiguous organizational boundaries.