Hybridity between disruption and temporality in instable organizations

Hybrid organisations often emerge when times pose complex challenges. The recent pandemic confronted organisations with a crisis event that was followed by a series of turbulences that organisations had to deal with. As the editors explain in the introduction, research work on hybrid organizations, their composition and governance, requires a plurality of viewpoints. Indeed, hybrid organizations present a twofold source of complexity: on the one hand, they are articulated in a variety of ways and sectors, and on the other hand, they are governed by a plurality of models and declinations. In this chapter, we mainly explore the governance problems of hybrid organizations at unforeseen events that require quick and negotiated choices. For this reason, we selected a case study on the management of the emergency economic support provided to business companies after the lockdown of people and the shutdown of economic activities imposed by the pandemic. The pandemic was a disruptive event in which everything changed rapidly and all organizations, including central and peripheral governments, had to move over unfamiliar terrain and make difficult choices. In this context, resilience became the urgency for scholars and practitioners (Frigotto et al, 2022) and organizations would have wanted to be able to rely on previously prepared resilience; while often they had to build it from scratch, not seldom improvising. Overall, all administrations had to resort to a strong investment in resilience and for the first time in recent history, perhaps, the pandemic challenge allowed us to see similar transformations that saw the creation of a plurality of hybrid organisations. Turbulence is a recurring factor in management challenges. As Ansell and Trondal (2018) remind us, turbulence is in the present time a characterisation that invites reflection on the ability to develop governance as a space to set the conditions for a new normal. Indeed, remember Trondal and colleagues (2022) the processes of globalisation and the events that periodically interrupt the usual flow of activities can take on different intensities that can pose considerable complexities to organisational management. The assumption of this paper is that the pandemic has been unique in the same way that earthquakes or other disruptive events can be, where the exercise in flexibility and response does follow many different lines of resilience as suggested by Pinheiro and colleagues (2022) Pandemic crises and earthquakes or major unforeseen environmental disasters do not allow for drawing on tried and tested or otherwise available practices in an expected or at least possible repertoire of scenarios. Here, the relationship between the public and private has had to construct new spaces of relationship through ad hoc governance or ownership modes or through a sort of convergence or combination of institutional logics by taking from the public or private any resources available at the time (Skelcher and Smith 201, Grossi et al. 2017). The pandemic has put a strain on the social and business fabric and from the outset, governments have worked to help economic actors withstand the challenges of lockdown and the limitations imposed on different economic sectors. Public administrations had to intervene to provide economic contributions to support those who saw their productive capacity reduced to zero. In this situation, typical difficulties in public administration such as limited digitalisation and complex disarticulation of competences became evident. A crucial one was when projects of digital portals dedicated to the disbursement of subsidies were put in place. These projects were the object of complex multi- stakeholder negotiations because these portals had to be organised in the shortest possible time by activating bureaucratic procedures capable of disbursing a large amount of contributions in compliance with the legal regulations of administrative procedures. Analysing in a retrospective way what happened in the experience of a regional administration in Northern Italy, we show that the pandemic acted as a disruptive factor towards which all public and private organisations engaged to overcome differences and traditional separations between the private and the public logics, and jointly design a successful portal for the disbursement of contributions named here #Restoreproject. The triggered process towards hybridity produced the adoption of combined solutions, competencies and mental models that are instead typical of each (private or public) side involved. As a matter of fact, it was possible to activate under-utilised competences in various organisations, to converge public administration departments on new digitalisation processes, to collaborate with external private suppliers and intermediary stakeholders and end users. However, the analysis confirms that these hybridisation processes driven only by the emergency do not hold up in the light of the gradual return to normality and in this return a possible hoarding of skills developed on the frontier between the public administration and external providers is wasted. We investigate the possible understanding of such outcome, showing how hybridity is highly challenging for the persistence of the logics being hybridized. In this perspective, an event that is highly disruptive may have the necessary force to trigger a path toward hybridity. However, when the disruption is alleviated, hybridity may be abandoned and its experience forgotten, showing that there is a temporality of hybridity.