LUISS Business School and IESE Business School are equal partner in the organization of the Conference “Hybrid Organizations: walking at the edge between economic performance and social & environmental impact”.
Hybrid organizations are founded on the concept of hybrid organizing, “which we define as the activities, structures, processes and meanings by which organizations make sense of and combine multiple organizational forms. We propose that social enterprises that combine the organizational forms of both business and charity at their cores are an ideal type of hybrid organization, making social enterprise an attractive setting to study hybrid organizing”. (J. Battilana, M, Lee, Advancing Research on Hybrid Organizing – Insights from the Study of Social Enterprises, in The Academy of Management Annals, 2014, p. 397.)
The development of the global economic system has offered few solutions to many long-lasting problems affecting our societies, such as poverty or exclusion in the social sphere and climate change or water shortage in the environmental sphere. In these transformations, hybrid organizations have begun to play a crucial role: on the borderline between economic performance and social and environmental impact, hybrid organizations try to respond to social and environmental problems by applying market mechanisms (Ebrahim et al., 2014). Hybrid organizations face the challenge of merging two different worlds, producing novel and sustainable solutions to pursue a positive and substantial social and environmental impact trying to reach both economic aims at the same time.
This conference is aimed at gathering scholars from different literature streams interested in highlighting the mechanisms through which hybridity is created and sustained, focusing on the ways these organizations generate, preserve and expand their hybridity. An opportunity where the community of scholars conducting research on hybrid organizations, can meet, reinforce ties and create new ones, discuss new ideas and receive feedback.
Key scholars in the field – among them Johanna Mair, Anne Claire Pache, Guido Palazzo, Tommaso Ramus and Ute Stephan – will join the conference and present their work, to give more substance to the debate. A Thematic Symposium of Journal of Business Ethics on related issues, with the title: “Social Enterprises: walking ethically on the edge between economic performance and social and environmental impact” will be also showcased at the conference.
29/03/2017
