Institutional Settlements and Organizational Hybridity: The Rise and Fall of Supervised Consumption Sites

In this chapter, the authors consider the relationships between institutional settlements at the field level and the instantiation of logics at the organizational level. The authors present the case of Supervised Consumption Sites (also known as Safe Injection Sites) in Alberta, Canada where a settlement of logics supported by one government was disrupted with the election of a new provincial government in 2015, and then disrupted again after the election of yet another government four years later. The authors use this case to show how different institutional settlements can support or threaten particular types of organizations, and they also show how the instantiation of different settlements in organizations (organizational hybridity) can impact the ways in which organizations present themselves. By analyzing the public justifications provided by key members of Supervised Consumption Sites, they draw attention to connections between institutional settlements at the field level and organizational attempts to manage multiple logics.