Making a hybrid out of a crisis: historical contingency and the institutional logics of London’s public transport monopoly

Abstract

Purpose Literature seldom admits the importance of historical contingency and politics in the creation of hybrid organisations. Nevertheless, the circumstances of their creation play a pivotal role in the subsequent operation, priorities and success of these prolific organisations. Through a single case study, this paper aims to explore the connection between the multiple and concurrent crises that created London Transport and the subsequent balance of its institutional logics. Design/methodology/approach This case study uses in-depth data collection from multiple archival and public sources to offer quantitative and qualitative analysis of the priorities, logics and services offered by London Transport before and after its transition from a private to a hybrid organisation. Findings Providing London’s transport via a quasi-autonomous non-governmental monopoly was justified as being more efficient than competition. However, by applying accounting ratios to the archival records from London Transport, the authors find that there were few decisive efficiencies gained from amalgamation. Instead, the authors argue that the balance of institutional logics within the new, unified organisation showed a political response outwardly addressing market failure but primarily concerned with marginalising democratic control. This reality was obscured behind the rhetoric of rationality and efficiency as politically neutral justifications for creating a public service monopoly. Originality/value This paper challenges supposedly objective systems for judging the effectiveness of “hybrid” organisations and offers an alternative political and historical perspective of the reasons for their creation. The authors suggest that London Transport’s success in obscuring its enduring market-based institutional logics has wider resonance in the development of municipal capitalism.

“And yet it moves!” An institutional analysis of the Immobili’s motion towards hybridity

“…To contribute to fill both the outlined research gaps, we share the opinion that hybrid organizations have long existed (Battilana et al , 2012) and, particularly in the non-profit sector, hybridity represents “a long-standing characteristic” (Smith, 2014, p. 11). Some evidence of this “longevity” has been provided by the previous studies that have adopted the historical approach to investigate hybridity within organizations (Carter and McKinlay, 2013; Gillett and Tennent, 2018; Fowler and Gillett, 2021), and have eventually identified specific cases of hybrid organizations in the past centuries among both enterprises (Antonelli et al , 2017) and social entities (Lusiani et al , 2019, 2023). However, based on the still limited number of these studies, we believe that the past still provides several unexplored contexts that could contribute to deepening our knowledge of hybridity within organizations.…”