From Legitimation to Failure: The Downfall of a Temporary Hybrid Organizing in Smart City Project

Abstract

Organizational hybridity refers to operating in a context of institutional plurality due to a combination of multiple, often conflicting elements of institutional logic. To be successful, organizations must develop strategies to combine logic and sustain their hybrid forms. Success, however, is not inevitable. The simultaneous pursuit of dissimilar and oftentimes conflicting logics causes hybrid arrangements to experience divergent pressures from various stakeholders and, in many cases, fail. This study illustrates that hybridity failure is not always the reverse of succeeding. Instead, failure may occur through a complex trajectory of de-settlement. Utilizing archival data, we empirically examine Toronto's new Quayside smart city projects as the case of temporary organizing in which a public-private partnership between Waterfront Toronto (public) and Google's affiliate Sidewalk Labs organization (private) has been failed. Drawing on an in-depth field study, we develop a framework to track distinct hybridity trajectories, including complementary, separation and contestation trajectories that all together led to the hybridity failure. We reveal mechanisms associated with each trajectory and show how the pathway led to the hybridity failure.