Power and Politics in Hybrid Organizations: A Non-essentialist Analysis of Organizational Identity

• In Event: Key Stakeholders, Power, and Decision-Making

Abstract

Hybrid organizations in the third sector merge the provision of social services in accordance with economic limits, thus splitting their workforce into subunits adhering to conflicting conceptions of ‘what we do’ and thus ‘who we are’. This is exemplified by internal stakeholders’ (like volunteers and paid staff) diverging conceptions of their ‘Organizational Identity’ (OI) between idealistic and economic conceptions for one and the same nonprofit organization (NPO) (cf. Kreutzer & Jäger 2011). NPOs that combine multiple OIs within themselves may erupt into open conflict between their subunits, possibly leading to a total breach of identity followed by reconstruction (cf. Jacobs et al. 2021). Or they may have to deal with the ongoing dialectic tensions that, among other consequences, strain employee commitment and increase attrition, if not managed properly.

However, scholars and practitioners lack a coherent framework explaining the tensions relating collective with individual identity conceptions and vice versa due to different levels of analysis (cf. Ashforth 2016). To manage such tensions, one is dependent on analyzing the relations of contesting conceptions of collective identity: Both central and peripheral. Due to this given necessity of being aware of the processes of subjugation and resistance (cf. Humphrey & Brown 2002) in OI discourse, the essentialist question of ‘who we are’ is of no use in solving the problem of interlevel linkage by itself.

To dissect such mechanisms of disciplinary power, we deal with the question: How do collectives become ‘who they are’? Or to be more precise: How are individual and collective identity claims influencing the formation of Organizational Identity and vice versa? Therefore –theorizing upon mounting evidence on ‘differing collective self-descriptions’ (cf. Kreutzer & Jäger 2011), ‘identity-elasticity’ (cf. Kreiner et al. 2015) and ‘political strategies’ (cf. Jacobs et al. 2021) being involved in OI formation– the research goal of this article is to consider OI’s political dimensions and the involvement of power to solve the problem of interlevel linkage.

We do this by contrasting the three main paradigms of OI research (Alvesson et al. 2008) about their capability to explain interdependency of individual, subunit and organizational identity as called for by Ashforth (2016) with a focus on power and politics called for by Kenny et al. (2016). Applying a coherent theoretical lens of analysis to all levels of identity enables interlevel linkage of different identity claims by keeping them comparable within the same framework. Based on the discursive relations of difference and equivalence introduced by the ‘Theory of Hegemony’ (Mouffe & Laclau 2019(1985)), this article adapts the concept of ‘the universal’ (cf. Nonhoff 2006, 2019) from political theory to reconstruct the ongoing formation of OI in-depth. By applying ‘hegemony analysis’ –a functional variant of discourse analysis– to shine light on antagonisms in identity work and regulation and their role in interlevel linkages at the boundary between self and other(s) in hybrid organizations.

References

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Authors

• Kai U. Klein, Vienna University of Economics and Business

• Jurgen Willems, Vienna University of Economics and Business