The challenge of sustaining organizational hybridity: The role of power and agency

Abstract

Hybrid organizations harbor different and often conflicting institutional logics, thus facing the challenge of sustaining their hybridity. Crucial to overcoming this challenge is the identification process of organizational actors. We propose a theorization of how power relations affect this process. More specifically, we argue that an actor’s power influences their own professional identity: an increase [decrease] in their power, via the heightened [diminished] control that this power provides them over organizational discourse, boosts [threatens] their identity. Our theorization has implications for the longevity of a newly adopted logic within an organization. If the new logic modifies incumbent power relations, the identities of (formerly and newly) powerful individuals are influenced, which may lead these individuals to promote or resist the new logic, thereby affecting the odds that the logic will survive within the organization. We illustrate our theorization with a case study in a professional service firm. Our study contributes to nascent research on hybrid organizations by emphasizing the role of power and agency in the longevity of hybridity.

Working at the boundaries: Middle managerial work as a source of emancipation and alienation

“…More broadly, our theorization links to discussions surrounding hybridity, multiplicity and the ambivalent workplace experiences they implyfor instance, in studies of interorganizational collaborations (Teulier and Rouleau, 2013) or of the power-identity struggles within hybrid organizations (e.g. Mangen and Brivot, 2015). Individuals working in such inbetween circumstances may experience switching between multiple roles as being important parts of their interfacing job.…”

And then there were none: what a UCU archive tells us about employee relations in marketising universities

“…In universities, ER tensions are becoming increasingly pronounced: academics are coerced to review their professional functionality as managerialism is replacing a modus operandi that afforded academics substantially more discretion than is the norm now (Deem 1998;Rosewell and Ashwin 2018;Winter 2017). This tendency contradicts the view expressed in the literature that professions requiring creativity and very specific (sometimes unique) knowledge render metering individual output difficult and therefore call for a degree of self-regulation (Mangen and Brivot 2015;von Nordenflycht 2010). Apart from academics, an example of such occupations includes accredited professionals in law, accounting and different forms of consultancy.…”

“…Although in reality this is a quasi-market created and dominated by government intervention (Agasisti and Catalano 2006), its formation has resulted in universities becoming hybrid organisations combining different, often conflicting, institutional logics (ILs), i.e. socially constructed frames of reference that organisational actors use to infuse their work with meaning (Mangen and Brivot 2015). They represent core cognitive principles and values that guide people at work.…”

Pluralism in Organizations: Learning from Unconventional Forms of Organizations

“…Ashcraft (), explains that leaders may manage or even suppress episodes of conflict using strategies of ‘organized dissonance’, which include humour, coercion and a host of other tactics that discourage organizational members from voicing dissent. Moreover, upper management may have less influence than generally expected if we regard each logic as associated with a separate coalition and power centre within the organization (Mangen and Brivot ). Accordingly, organizational structures of hybrid organizations may not be entirely products of top‐down design, but the result of the bottom‐up accumulation of truces between coalitions (Bishop and Waring ).…”