Bowing before Dual Gods: How Structured Flexibility Sustains Organizational Hybridity

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…