The New Heretics: Hybrid Organizations and the Challenges They Present to Corporate Sustainability

Abstract

Corporate sustainability has gone “mainstream”; reaching into all areas of business management. Yet, despite this progress, large-scale social and ecological issues continue to worsen. In this paper, we examine how corporate sustainability has been operationalized as a concept that supports the dominant beliefs of strategic management rather than challenging them to shift business beyond the unsustainable status quo. Against this backdrop, we consider how hybrid organizations (organizations at the interface between for-profit and non-profit sectors that address social and ecological issues) are operating at odds with beliefs embedded in strategic management and corporate sustainability literatures. We offer six propositions that further define hybrid organizations based on challenges they present to the assumptions embedded in these literatures, and position them as new heretics of mainstream strategic management and corporate sustainability orthodoxy. We conclude with the implications of this heretical force for theory and practice.