Building Sustainable Hybrid Organizations: The Case of Commercial Microfinance Organizations

Abstract

We explore how new types of hybrid organizations (organizations that combine institutional logics in unprecedented ways) can develop and maintain their hybrid nature in the absence of a "ready-to-wear" model for handling the tensions between the logics they combine. The results of our comparative study of two pioneering commercial microfinance organizations suggest that to be sustainable new types of hybrid organizations need to create a common organizational identity that strikes a balance between the logics they combine. Our evidence further suggests that the crucial early levers for developing such an organizational identity among organizational members are hiring and socialization policies.

The International Growth of a Social Business: A Case Study

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Hybridity as a process of technology's ‘translation’: Customizing a national Electronic Patient Record

“…Our findings suggest that hybridity does not emerge from a combination of two or more pre-existing entities (Battilana & Dorado, 2010;Bloomfield & Hayes, 2009) but from their translation. We have shown for instance that the NCRS was not a sum of the different perceptions stakeholders had of clinical knowledge and of the NHS but an amalgamation of their interpretation, translation and inscription into the NCRS.…”

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