About

Background

Forms of organizing social activities, institutions and work have always been ubiquitous but never self-explanatory. There is a long-standing discussion on markets, hierarchies, networks and hybrids exploring the richness of social forms of organizing (Powell 1990; Ouchi 1979; Williamson 1985).

With respect to pursuing important societal activities, such as improving the level of education, maintaining health and keeping up infrastructure, it is sometimes difficult to disentangle public organizations and activities from private efforts. It has become commonplace to use the concept of hybrids to depict the institutional space between the public and private sectors (Johanson et al. 2015).

It is possible to talk about hybrids in the context of markets and hierarchies as well as in the context of public and private forms of action. In this project, hybrid forms of governance refer to institutional settings in which corporations with both public and private owners may operate toward public interest or activity, or where private (for-profit or non-profit) firms increasingly take care of the public service provision.

Goal

The general purpose of this project is to study external and internal performance measurement systems in hybrid forms of governance and the ways in which those metric systems influence and shape decision-making rationalities of hybrid institutions.

External systems refer to systems of evaluation by which hybrid systems and organizations respond to their external environments, expectations and regulations of government, society and the marketplace. By internal systems, we refer to systems that hybrid organizations have designed for themselves and that hybrids utilize to cope with uncertainty and ambiguity of decision-making with different contrasting institutional logics and rationales.

Impact

Novel theorization of performance metrics systems in hybrid governance would be an important breakthrough in international research. As the PI and other members of the research team are actively engaged with developing this research agenda in international forums, we consider the utilization potential to the scientific community significant. Based on previous experience by the research team, it is known that there is an increasing need in institutional practice for the analysis of hybrid systems and organizations and, respectively, for understanding their performance metrics problems.

The project has a significant potential in creating high impacts on society and public policy-making. Finland is undertaking major structural reforms of reorganizing social and health care services and the regional level of government, is in the process of revising R&D systems and higher education, and pursuing new competitive advantages through clean and environmental technologies.