The social entrepreneurship discourse in Germany has become more prominent at a time when the deeply rooted corporatist traditions of social provision have come under pressure for marketization. This article examines the potential role of “social entrepreneurs” in the institutionally established German welfare state. The article analyzes the opportunities and constraints that new players face. Drawing on survey data and case studies in the areas of elderly care and advancement of children with immigrant background, the analysis retraces the structure and diffusion of social entrepreneurial projects. It concludes that the simple transfer of the social entrepreneurship model is unlikely. The analysis suggests that successful social ventures in Germany adapt the notion of social entrepreneurship to prevalent institutional realities. In the context of more encompassing social services, dense decentralized networks, and different cultures of philanthropism, new players have a complementary role that stimulates rather than dominates the process of social innovation.

We examine how societal-level institutional logics impact the way in which hybridity develops in nonprofit organizations using international, comparative and qualitative case studies of community regeneration organizations in England and France. The research applies theoretically based conjectures about types of hybridity to empirical data generated from 20 interviews, document analysis and observation in five nonprofits in the city of Lyon and five in Sheffield. We find that the French nonprofits are ‘blended’ hybrids that integrate state and community institutional logics, while ‘assimilated’ hybrids combining state, community and market logics are found in the English cases. Undertaking contextually situated analysis of institutional logics generates new knowledge on the influences on nonprofits’ rules, practices and narratives, so improving the level of knowledge about, and capacity to manage, this sector.

The notion of a “welfare mix” has two different points of reference. One is the variety of institutional arrangements of modern welfare states in, basically, capitalist democracies. This is primarily connected to a cross-country comparative perspective, very much influenced by classic pieces of research on the varieties of welfare states in general and related typologies (above all Esping-Andersen, The three worlds of welfare capitalism, 1990; see also Arts and Gelissen J Eur Soc Policy 12:137–158, 2002; Castles et al., The Oxford handbook of the welfare state, 2011). We believe to know, for instance, that Scandinavian welfare states are much more state-centered and, accordingly, third sector organizations much less important than in, say, conservative or corporatist welfare states such as Germany or Austria or in liberal welfare states such as the United States (cf. Salamon and Anheier, Defining the nonprofit sector: a cross-national analysis, 1997). A second point of reference of the “mix” of welfare state arrangements is the combination of sector-specific institutions in the provision of welfare-related services in a given country. It is here where the notion of hybridity is particularly relevant since it is typically the arrangement of overlapping sectoral segments that characterize the “mix” in question (cf. Evers Int J Public Adm 28:736–748, 2005 for an overview). Examples are tax exempted foundations in the field of education or science, private voluntary associations providing public goods such as social services of various kinds or private goods such as housing provided by public enterprises or cooperatives.

This article explores the interplay and collaboration between refugee organization volunteers and social service professionals. On the basis of qualitative interviews and observations, we study how volunteers from Danish local refugee organizations experience their interaction with refugees and social service professionals, and how they act and perceive their role as advocates for the refugees. The purpose is to gain insight into the everyday practices and strategies of civil society organizations attempting to balance the demands and interests of stakeholders and internal legitimacy claims in a hybrid environment. In addition to providing effective refugee assistance and services, refugee organizations achieve legitimacy through professional communication, campaign work, and networking with key political actors and stakeholders. However, although it may be less visible, advocacy-oriented activities also take place in local organizations at ‘street level.’ We identified three distinct types of strategies to balance issues of autonomy in the collaborative relationship with the municipalities and simultaneously engage in advocacy activities.

Present day welfare societies rely on a complex mix of different providers ranging from the state, markets, family, and non-profit organizations to unions, grassroots organizations, and informal networks. At the same time changing welfare discourses have opened up space for new partnerships, divisions of labor, and responsibilities between these actors. For nonprofit organizations this means that they operate in complex institutional environments where different institutions and logics compete with each other. In this special issue we have collected a number of articles that analyze how organizations and organizational fields adjust to a new environment that is increasingly dominated by the logic of the market, and how in particular nonprofit organizations, as hybrids by definition, are able to cope with new demands, funding structures, and control mechanism.

The influence of the state policy agenda though a neo-liberal contracted funding environment is redefining the boundaries of the third sector through a process of hybridisation. Hybridised organisations adapt to possess characteristics and logics of multiple sectors (public, private or community). Increasing hybridity within the New Zealand community and voluntary sector has resulted in a perceived dichotomy separating organisations that adapt to these challenges from those that resist. In this paper, we apply a hybridity lens to seven community development organisations, who have predominantly resisted marketisation and alignment with the state policy agenda, to assess the extent of their hybridity and how this has impacted on their place in the community and voluntary sector and access to funding opportunities available from the state.

Citizen participation is manifested through various concepts, such as activism, social movements, volunteering or civil society. The different ways of understanding popular engagement are often separated by delimitations that define them, particularly volunteering and civic action, as two highly differentiated forms of participation in the distinct academic disciplines: political science, volunteering studies, social movement studies or civil society theory. This article considers whether this basic theoretical differentiation can be problematised in the Spanish political context by exploring four paradigmatic cases of popular engagement, using qualitative case study methodology, specifically, a historic case from the 1990s and three more recent cases. It is hoped that the results of the study—which differentiates between organisational hybridity and fuzziness—will encourage reflection on the traditional boundaries between different forms of popular engagement.

This paper explores the complex process of hybridisation of third-sector housing and support organisations (TSOs) in Northern Ireland. The focus of the study is the policy field of housing-related support services, known in the UK as ‘Supporting People’. This is a hybrid policy field involving several government departments, a number of market mechanisms and two types of third-sector actors. The exercise of organisational agency to adapt to competing drivers is illuminated through mental health and homelessness case studies. The paper explores how competing external influences from the Northern Ireland Assembly, horizontal policies for the third-sector and vertical service commissioning policies interact with TSOs’ own adaptation strategies involving the deployment of robust third-sector identities. Hybridisation is found to involve not only the dominance of state drivers and the promotion of market mechanisms in both fields, but also enactment of third-sector identities. Our analysis of hybridization in this case counters Billis’ (2010) representation of third-sector identity as weak, in flux, and subject to erosion by focusing on the agency of TSOs to strategically adapt to and negotiate external drivers and thereby achieve competitive advantage. Through the enactment of identity in this adaptation process, resources such as legitimacy, charitable income and volunteers are secured. This provides opportunities for policy makers to add value if they are prepared to emphasise horizontal over vertical policy goals.

Social enterprises have gained wide recognition as a tool for solving social and environmental problems. They generate new opportunities in the social sphere, while being active in the commercial field. They are hybrid organizations that face many challenges when pursuing frequently conflicting goals. Social enterprises are therefore an expression of the possibility of different institutional logics coexisting as part of the same organization. Social enterprises running a commercial activity and using business-like practices legitimize the market logic, while the social goal of their operation is consistent with the logic of social welfare. Although there an intense discussion takes place in the literature on institutional logics that may affect nonprofits’ activity as hybrid organizations, so far the topic has been empirically verified only to a limited extent. The aim of this article is to examine the successful coexistence of the market logic and the social-welfare logic in NGOs acting as social enterprises. On the basis of a representative national survey of 3800 NGOs, including 412 carrying out market sales and thereby referred to as social enterprises, a one-factor analysis of variance was carried out. The obtained findings of the study indicate that social enterprises acting as non-governmental organizations successfully combine the market and the social-welfare logics.

The rise and global reach of the corporate foundation (CF) phenomenon has attracted the attention of academic researchers and practitioners and led to a plurality of definitions and understandings. This definitional fuzziness notwithstanding, the term hybridity is widely used as the defining characteristic to describe a CF’s position between business and civil society and its diverse interlinkages with its founding company. However, the extant literature has seldom explained what hybridity signifies, when it occurs and how it is shown. This paper presents the findings of a systematic review of the academic and gray literature on CFs. Based on 80 publications covering 30 countries worldwide, this study proposes 15 characteristics along four global themes as a comprehensive set to account for the complexity of CFs. It develops propositions for a fine-grained understanding of what constitutes the hybrid nature of CFs at the strategic, organizational and contextual levels. Accordingly, this study suggests ways forward by revealing questions that require further research toward a better understanding of the CF phenomenon.

Social enterprises pursue a dual mission: on the one hand, they strive for social purpose, while on the other, they try to achieve economic stability despite scarce resources. To achieve the dual mission, social enterprises avail themselves of both for-profit and non-profit institutional logics. Due to this combination of multiple institutional logics, such enterprises can be classified as hybrid organizations. This study focuses on these organizations and investigates tensions between social enterprises and various stakeholder groups caused by the use of commercial logics within the social sector. In particular, we examine the perception of commercial versus social welfare logics by various stakeholder groups, and investigate the effects on organizational communication. Our study is centered on social franchise enterprises. We use an exploratory qualitative research approach based on semi-structured interviews with 21 social franchisors and social franchisees of seven social franchise enterprises. Our main results suggest that the use of commercial logics in the social sector tends to decrease the legitimacy of social franchise enterprises in the eyes of internal stakeholders, the general public, and various (but not all) external stakeholder groups. Many stakeholders of social franchise enterprises show a strong aversion to commercial logics, and particularly to commercial terminology. Overall, we conclude that social franchise enterprises very consciously apply commercial and social welfare logics and use alternative terminology where necessary to retain legitimacy and prevent tensions.

In this paper we explore the nature of hybrid organisations and report on the existence over time in social housing in Ireland. We first review the literature to identify three different conceptualisations of the concept of hybridity and its relation to the study on nonprofit organisations. We then look at hybridity in social housing in Ireland over three centuries—drawing upon previous empirical research from Mullins et al. (Non-profit housing organisations in Ireland, North and South: changing forms and challenging futures. Northern Ireland Housing Executive, Belfast, 2003) and Rhodes (Public services as complex adaptive systems: a framework for theory development. Trinity College Dublin, Unpublished PhD Thesis, 2008)—to assess which of the conceptualisations is most relevant to the Irish context. We conclude that the ‘fit-for-purpose’ approach as represented by Dees and Anderson (Society 40:16–27, 2003) and explored in recent social entrepreneurship literature is most relevant to the Irish case, and suggest that this should be augmented by the argument put forth by Mullins et al. (Hous Stud 27(4):405–417, 2012) that the concept of hybridity is more analytically valuable as a dynamic process rather than a static description.