Hybrid Organizations: Re-exploration on Concept and Category

Xiao Hongjun; Yang Zhen; Shang Huichen

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20210918.102

Summary

With the evolution of the “new public management” movement and the accelerating trend of commercial socialization in the 21st century, the boundary between the public sector, the private sector and the third sector has become more and more blurred, and a large number of hybrid organizations with both market orientation and social value creation orientation have emerged in the market. Accordingly, the growing popularity of hybrid organizations in practice has also accelerated the academic research on the basic theory of hybrid organizations and the growth of hybrid organizations. However, although the basic concept of hybrid organization has been interpreted by many scholars, it also intensifies the cognitive differences of hybrid organizations and the process of “concept jungle”, resulting in a great degree of cognitive and operational confusion on the identification, classification and judgment of hybrid organizations. This paper provides a critical review framework for the existing classification methods of hybrid organizations, and promotes the academic community to get out of the multiple fog and “concept jungle” of the conceptual theory of hybrid organizations. At the practical level, it helps organizations realize the transformation and innovation of hybrid organizations under the guidance of sustainable development, and provides operable identification and judgment methods.

The research logic of this paper is to systematically deconstruct the multiple schools of the concept interpretation of hybrid organizations. Based on the literature related to hybrid organizations, it analyzes the multiple theoretical schools of the concept definition of hybrid organizations, extracts the theoretical logic and definition perspective of hybrid organizations, and finally clarifies the origin and development of hybrid organization characteristics and theoretical schools. Based on the differences of theoretical perspectives, the concept definition and essential cognition of hybrid organizations belong to three theoretical perspectives: governance style view, construction form view and organization form view. Based on the differences in defining logical aspects, the definition methods of hybrid organization concept can be divided into two categories, including the definition method with “element hybrid” as the logical starting point and the definition method with “interval location method” as the logical starting point.

On this basis, this paper focuses on the fuzzy and controversial boundaries of hybrid organizations from the perspective of organizational sociology and economic sociology, and then puts forward the classification and discrimination method of “element combination – hybrid degree” to get out of the “concept jungle” and category differences of hybrid organizations. Specifically, this paper puts forward the concepts of hybrid degree threshold, hybrid degree category and hybrid intensity, takes the commerciality and sociality of organizations as two axes, identifies and defines the curve interval distribution of the five types of hybrid organizations, extends the linear spectrum of hybrid organizations of Alter (2007) to the non-linear curve envelope space, and expands the research on the cognitive and category judgment methods of hybrid organizations. Finally, this paper puts forward the future prospect of hybrid organization research, and believes that we need to focus on the basic theory of hybrid organizations, the measurement and evaluation system of “hybrid degree”, the performance evaluation and value creation effect of hybrid organizations, and the cross-level research of hybrid organizations.