Building Legitimacy for Hybrid Organisations

Social enterprise hybrids adopt financially sustainable business strategies to achieve social sector
success – they thus combine aspects of two or more categories of organizations. In doing so they
face a legitimacy struggle in that by seeking to comply with expectations associated with both the
private sector and the social sector, often conflicting categories, they end up being neither one type
nor another. If however social enterprise hybrids can be successful in both dimensions then one
solution to the confusion is to help establish the hybrid form as a new legitimate organizational
category. In this paper we empirically investigate the legitimacy-building activities and discourses
of a network established to promote community-owned renewable energy cooperatives. We identify
four discursive activities associated with building legitimacy for social enterprise hybrids: critiquing
the parameters of the field; proposing a new combination of existing logics; advocating the
advantages of hybrid organizations; and communicating the new practices of hybrid organizations.