Bowing before Dual Gods How Structured Flexibility Sustains Organizational Hybridity

Organizations increasingly grapple with hybridity—the combination of identities, forms, logics, or other core elements that would conventionally not go together. Drawing on in-depth longitudinal data from the first ten years of a successful social enterprise—Digital Divide Data, founded in Cambodia—...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Administrative science quarterly Vol. 64; no. 1; pp. 1 - 44
Main Authors: Smith, Wendy K., Besharov, Marya L.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Los Angeles, CA Sage Publications, Inc 01.03.2019
SAGE Publications
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects:
Adaptation
Cognition
Deities
Enactment
Experts
Flexibility
Identity
Internet access
Leadership
Meaning
Organizations
Scholarship
Social entrepreneurship
social enterprise
paradox
organizational identity
hybrid organizations
ISSN:0001-8392, 1930-3815
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Organizations increasingly grapple with hybridity—the combination of identities, forms, logics, or other core elements that would conventionally not go together. Drawing on in-depth longitudinal data from the first ten years of a successful social enterprise—Digital Divide Data, founded in Cambodia—we induce an empirically grounded model of sustaining hybridity over time through structured flexibility: the interaction of stable organizational features and adaptive enactment processes. We identify two stable features—paradoxical frames, involving leaders’ cognitive understandings of the two sides of a hybrid as both contradictory and interdependent, and guardrails, consisting of formal structures, leadership expertise, and stakeholder relationships associated with each side—that together facilitate ongoing adaptation in the meanings and practices of dual elements, sustaining both elements over time. Our structured flexibility model reorients research away from focusing on either stable or adaptive approaches to sustaining hybridity toward understanding their interaction, with implications for scholarship on hybridity, duality, and adaptation more broadly.
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ISSN:0001-8392
1930-3815
DOI:10.1177/0001839217750826