Organizing spectral hybridity: An ethnography of a sheltered workshop in Japan

Abstract

Hybrid organizations increasingly play key roles in resolving social challenges by combining multiple logics that are not normally combined. Drawing on ethnographic research of a successful hybrid organization – a sheltered workshop managing both welfare through training disabled individuals and bakery business in Japan – we develop theory on combining hybrid elements differently across subunits, what we call “spectral hybridity”. Spectral hybridity occurs when subunits across the organization adhere to the competing hybrid elements to differing degrees. Specifically, we propose spectral hybridity as sustainable through three practices- compartmentalizing variegated hybrid units, distributing tensions across the subunits, and progressive connection between bipolarity. Spectral hybridity makes welfare and business as a continuum. Our spectral hybridity model reorients research away from focusing on either integration or differentiation approaches or both integration and differentiation approaches to the mutual constitution between connection and differentiation with implications for scholarship on hybrid organizing in social challenge.