'Keeping it Weird’: How Anchoring Sustains Hybrid Organizing from the Ground

While much research has focused on how institutional complexity can be managed at the organizational level, we know less about how individuals experience and cope with conflicting institutional prescriptions. To examine how individuals balance multiple logics as an ongoing accomplishment, we conducted an in-depth case study at a leading Benefit Corporation in the U.S. – a newly emerging hybrid form that incorporates a social welfare and commercial logic at its core. We find that not every organizational member experienced complexity to the same degree, and that individuals caught between conflicting institutional prescriptions coped by means of anchoring. Anchoring served to mitigate the discomfort experienced from having to satisfy competing demands, safeguard against drift toward either alternative and sustain bottom-up hybrid organizing. We contribute by shifting conversations from how hybridity and conflicting pressures need to be managed or overcome towards hybridity as an ongoing juggling act over time.