Servants of Multiple Masters? Aligning Plural Institutional Logics in a Climate Change Context

Abstract

Mitigating climate change requires a fundamental transformation of the energy system. This is a challenging task, particularly for publicly owned energy utilities. While they literally act as energy supply backbones, they are often in public ownership and thus – as hybrid organizations – confronted with a particularly complex institutional field. To better understand how such hybrid organizations respond to manifold institutional demands, this paper builds on the theoretical concept of institutional logics and complexity with a focus on decoupling. It adopts a case-study methodology and investigates the actions of four regional energy utilities in Austria vis-à-vis the strategic objectives of their public majority shareholders to transform the regional energy system in line with climate targets. It is suggested that the degree of conformity of a hybrid organization with different institutional logics is the result of the prioritization of predominant institutional logics and the organization’s sensitivity to these logics. The paper reveals that this prioritization is not straightforward but results from a multidimensional process with various interdependencies between the different logics. It investigates why and how energy utilities decouple from different logics and suggests that hybrid organizations decouple to compromise between different demands. In terms of practical implications, the paper argues how short-term prioritization of the community and business logics works against longer-term policy objectives, and it explains how this ultimately delays climate change mitigation.