Bowing before Dual Gods: How Structured Flexibility Sustains Organizational Hybridity
基于柬埔寨社会企业Digital Divide Data十年纵向数据，提出结构化灵活性模型，揭示稳定特征与适应性过程的互动如何维持组织混合性，对研究混合性、二元性和适应性的学者有参考价值。
Organizations increasingly grapple with hybridity—the combination of identities, forms, logics, or other core elements that would conventionally not go together. Drawing on in-depth longitudinal data from the first ten years of a successful social enterprise—Digital Divide Data, founded in Cambodia—we induce an empirically grounded model of sustaining hybridity over time through structured flexibility: the interaction of stable organizational features and adaptive enactment processes. We identify two stable features—paradoxical frames, involving leaders’ cognitive understandings of the two sides of a hybrid as both contradictory and interdependent, and guardrails, consisting of formal structures, leadership expertise, and stakeholder relationships associated with each side—that together facilitate ongoing adaptation in the meanings and practices of dual elements, sustaining both elements over time. Our structured flexibility model reorients research away from focusing on either stable or adaptive approaches to sustaining hybridity toward understanding their interaction, with implications for scholarship on hybridity, duality, and adaptation more broadly.