Recasting Organizational Hybridity: A New Approach to the Incompatibility of Institutional Logics Through the Higher Common Principle

Abstract

In neo-institutional theory, the concept of organizational hybridity is characterized by the combination of institutional logics that ‘would not conventionally go together,’ as they are deemed incompatible. However, our study shows that this criterion of incompatibility between logics is not theoretically robust enough to discriminate situations of organizational hybridity, as it struggles to differentiate incompatible logics from simply different logics. In response, this article proposes a new approach to incompatibility between institutional logics by mobilizing the concept of a higher common principle derived from the economies of worth. Through the rereading of five empirical articles mobilizing the concept of hybridity, we demonstrate how the higher common principle provides a more restrictive way of operationalizing incompatibility between logics to qualify organizational hybrids more rigorously. This study ultimately leads us to recast the concept of organizational hybridity as the combination of mutually exclusive institutional logics based on strictly distinct higher common principles.