ABSTRACT
Hybridization of organizations is a phenomenon of growing interest and particularly pertinent for nonprofit organizations. Existing research has focused on the micro level view into nonprofits undergoing hybridization. It stressed the benefits but also challenges that come through combining seemingly incompatible logics, for example a commercial and a welfare logic. This chapter extends this established view and is located at the intersection between organizations and organizational fields. It probes conditions of emergence as well as the interaction between hybrids and their environment. Based on a review of existing research, the chapter sheds light on what hybridization means for organizational capacity and the management of hybrids in particular: Hybridization is a procedural evolution that increases organizations’ acting capacity within dynamic context conditions and complex task environments, at the expense of higher transaction costs of management. Hybrids willingly enter continuous struggles for legitimacy and seem to favor contingency fit over institutional fit with their field. Often they temporarily defy both, to the brink of organizational collapse, in order to engage in transforming or creating institutions, that is change their field environment. Hybridization is thus a potent process for organizations, but also one that may increase organizational fragility.
