How Individuals Navigate Competing Social and Commercial Demands in Social Enterprises: The Micro-foundations of Hybrid Organizing

Sammanfattning

Social enterprises are hybrid organizations that simultaneously pursue social missions and engage in commercial activities to sustain their operations, generating persistent tensions between competing institutional logics. Although existing research has clarified the origins of these tensions and the organizational mechanisms designed to manage them, how hybridity is enacted through individual everyday practices remains underexplored. This study examines how individuals navigate the tensions arising out of competing social and commercial demands through their everyday practices within social enterprises. Drawing on institutional theory, paradox theory, ambivalence theory, and a microfoundational lens integrating practice theory, sensemaking theory, organizational identity theory, and the judgment-based approach, nine interviews were conducted across seven social enterprises and analyzed using the Gioia methodology. The analysis identified six aggregate dimensions through which individuals navigate hybrid tensions in their everyday work: Mission Anchoring, Relational Navigation, Adaptive Decision-Making, Navigating Through Ambivalence, Tactical Improvisation, and Identity Protection. These dimensions form a navigation repertoire in which anchoring practices continuously re-establish directional boundaries, operational practices respond situationally to specific tensions, and ambivalence functions as a persistent emotional orientation running through all practices simultaneously. The findings extend the microfoundational understanding of hybrid organizing by showing that the capacity to hold social and commercial tensions simultaneously is an individual-level achievement rather than an organizational property, and hybridity is sustained not through governance structures alone but through the continuous navigating work of individuals who translate competing institutional demands into workable organizational practice.