When Duality Fails: Addressing the Liability of Hybridity in a Field Dominated by Non-profit Values

Scholars have explored how hybrid organizations balance conflicting values internally, but less attention has been given to how they address critiques from external stakeholders who regard the combination of social and economic goals as illegitimate. Drawing from a study of influential stakeholders challenging the dual practices of a hybrid organization fighting child malnutrition, we examine how a hybrid organization can address what we call the ‘liability of hybridity’. We show how a hybrid organization can overcome this liability by combining ‘wedging’ and ‘alignment’ strategies through strategic framing, prompting influential stakeholders to revise their negative legitimacy assessments. Our study contributes to research on hybrid organizations and their capacity to address societal grand challenges, expands research on framing strategies by focusing on framing microprocesses (in particular, the ‘modularity’ of framing), and advances our understanding of how legitimacy assessments are made and revised.