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Inside The Hybrid Organization: Selective Coupling As A Response To Conflicting Institutional Logics

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The Academy of Management Journal

Published online on

Abstract

This paper explores how hybrid organizations, which incorporate competing institutional logics, internally manage the logics that they embody. Relying on an inductive comparative case study of four work integration social enterprises embedded in competing social welfare and commercial logics, we show that, instead of adopting strategies of decoupling or compromising, as typically suggested in the literature, these organizations selectively coupled intact elements prescribed by each logic. This strategy allowed them to project legitimacy to external stakeholders without having to engage in costly deceptions or negotiations. We further identify a specific hybridization pattern that we refer to as "Trojan horse", whereby organizations that entered the field with low legitimacy because of their embeddedness in the market logic strategically incorporated elements from the social logic in an attempt to gain legitimacy and acceptance. Surprisingly, they did so more than comparable organizations originating from the social logic. These findings suggest that, when lacking legitimacy in a given field, hybrids may manipulate the templates provided by the multiple logics in which they are embedded in an attempt to gain acceptance. Overall, our findings contribute to a better understanding of how organizations may survive and thrive when embedded in pluralistic institutional environments.