This article explores governance and accounting practices in hybrid organizations. Currently, hybrid organizations represent an increasingly pervasive phenomenon, but their role has also been central in the past. To achieve this aim, we consider the case of a charity, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, as its activity grew in scope and complexity during the sixteenth century in the Republic of Venice. The Scuole Grandi represents a form of hybrid organizations because these charities were privately managed, but publicly regulated. They shared a devotional orientation and performed de facto welfare functions in progressive integration with the State. Based on an analysis of balance sheets and administrative documents, this article aims to discuss the role of governance and accounting in enabling hybrid organizations to operate through multiple logics.

This paper sets out to explore how hybrid organizations managed their established institutional complexity in the past, and what place was there for accounting in this endeavor. The paper draws on a historical case study of how a social entity operated in 14th-16th-century Venice. Ca' di Dio, a hospice providing hospitality and care to poor women, is what today we would call a "hybrid organization," in that it was born at the crossroads of ecclesiastic and public jurisdictions, it was autonomously administered, self-financed through commercial activities, but operated within the public control of the State. It will be found that Ca' di Dio worked within a complex arrangement of multiple logics, that these logics coexisted without particular tension or conflict, and that accounting was a central practice to manage Ca' di Dio activities, despite its noncommercial nature. The paper thus, while contributing to documenting the presence of hybrid organizations in the past, also questions the presupposed tension and conflict in logics that these organizations are thought to come with. Finally, it also documents the trivial, but overlooked, role of accounting as primarily a calculative tool for everyday management in hybrid organizations.

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