Book Review: Hybrid Organizations and the Third Sector,Edited by David Billis: Review by Angela Bies

David Billis’s scholarly contributions mark the history of nonprofit studies in the United Kingdom, and his contributions are of global importance. Billis has shaped not only the scholarly institutions and publication venues we all now benefit from but also the theoretical literature on nonprofits as well. In this volume, Billis has assembled a veritable squad of luminaries from the U.K. nonprofit studies and policy communities, including Margaret Harris and David Lewis, among others.

At a time when nonprofit organizations are under pressure to be more “self-sustaining,” when social venture is common speak in the lexicons of both the proprietary and third sectors, and localities in varied settings are exploring “mixed purpose” or “low-profit limited liability” corporations, the movement toward hybridity of organizational form and purpose is on the rise. In the current economic climate, a volume on hybridity is timely, as conditions are blurring the sectoral lines more than ever. Yet to date, while hybridity is finding traction in practice and policy settings, much of the conversation has been normative, heavy on polemic, but limited in theoretical development. In Hybrid Organizations and the Third Sector, Billis raises questions central to understanding what it means when the distinctiveness of the three sectors is at play, and offers a new theory on hybrid organizations illuminated through a series of cases in this well-curated and timely volume.

The book is organized into two parts, with Part I laying out key concepts used in the book including hybrid organizations and third sector, as well as reviewing the contours of social policy in the United Kingdom, highlighting new public management and contracting out as the dominant themes. Billis then places key historic markers along these contours to note resultant changes in relationships, structures, and governance across the three sectors. Three chapters follow in Part I that set forth the context of the rise of hybrid organizations, including social policy influences, Billis’s novel theory of hybrid organizations, and the interplay with governance. The seven chapters in Part II focus on cases central to hybridity and serve to further the analytic exploration set forth in the context and theory sections. The volume closes with Billis outlining policy implications for the future, making the book highly relevant for those in practice, policy, and academic settings. While I find all chapters in the second half useful, I focus this review on the first half of the book, as this is where the bulk of the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings lay. Readers should peruse the entire volume and pay special attention to the varied contexts and units of analysis in which hybridization is explored in Part II.

In chapter 1, Billis argues for a need to move beyond vague notions of hybrid to the phenomenon that is hybrid organization. He also situates the problem of hybridity at the nexus of “fundamental and distinctly different governance and operational principles in each sector,” and sets forth four main challenges for practice, theory, and policy relative to hybridity, namely, What is the nature of change in the third sector?; What are hybrid Third Sector Organizations (TSOs) and how can the issues of accountability and transparency be addressed?; Stumbling into hybridity: can theory help?; and What are the wider questions and implications for practice and policy? (p. 3)

Margaret Harris addresses the first of Billis’s questions in chapter 2, titled, “Third sector organizations in a contradictory policy environment.” Here she does a masterful job of parsing the effects of the New Labor government since 1997 to stimulate hybrid organizations in increasingly complex forms. Drawing on a large range of extant empirical work on the topic, Harris illustrates that four key dimensions of the social policy environment of this time drove the rise of hybridization through: a focus on partnership and collaboration that fostered less concern over organizational boundaries and autonomies; a broadened conception of public services as a justification of hybridization; the move of TSOs into mainstream public service provision and a resultant normative isomorphism making TSOs quasigovernmental in form, thought, and deed; and a trend toward localism resulting in small TSOs developing more porous boundaries and complex shapes. Like Billis, Harris raises concern that the overall impact of these policy drivers has been a type of hybridization that results in TSOs looking more public sector–like, with traditional aspects of “third sectorness,” such as autonomy and independence, at risk.

In chapter 3, Billis first points to the ubiquity of the hybrid organization and then takes the reader toward a theory of hybrid organizations. A principal building block of this theory is the distinctiveness of the three sectors, particularly in relationship to ownership structures, governance, operational priorities, distinctive human resources, and distinctive financial resources. With this framing of the distinctiveness of the three sectors, he then explores the interstitial areas (i.e., nine “hybrid zones”) among the sectors in a model of hybridity that encompasses the relative dominance of sector distinctiveness to types of hybridization including entrenched, organic and enacted, and shallow forms of hybridity in action (p. 58).

We see some of this previewed first in chapter 4 entitled, “The governance of hybrid organizations,” in which Chris Cornforth and Roger Spear focus on accountability aspects of hybridity in action. With a focus on governance at the organizational level (in contrast to regulatory policy and political governance and TSOs, the polity, and the political intersections explored in chapter 9), the authors discuss varied levels of “trading” (i.e., commercial activity that is a primary, ancillary, or nonprimary to organizational mission) as a dimension of sectoral distinctiveness and resultant hybridization and accountability implications. They make a compelling case that the varied interests of key stakeholders are shaped by sectoral antecedents, and as the level of hybridity becomes more complex, so do the competing aims, values, and norms of such stakeholders to and in the governance process.

In chapter 9, the case of “Volunteers in hybrid organizations: A marginalized majority?” is explored by authors Angela Ellis Paine, Nick Ockenden, and Joanna Stuart. The authors draw from three large-scale national surveys in England to explore the volunteer workforce and its interaction with the development of the “hybrid zones.” For example, as organizations move from being highly associational (i.e., more TSO-like in character) and populated largely by a volunteer work force to more “professional” with greater reliance on paid staff as the central human resource, TSOs hybridize and adopt characteristics of public and private sector organizations. Here the authors point to the increasing dissatisfaction of volunteers “about the bureaucratization of the activities they feel passionate about ‘their’ TSOs have taken on the features of public and private sector organizations” (p. 109). This chapter provides an important lens into the alternative models for volunteer management, an area tremendously understudied in the context of hybridization and more generally.

In chapter 6, Colin Rochester and Malcolm Torry move to even less-travelled terrain with their inquiry into “Faith-based organizations and hybridity: A special case?” In the manner modeled by Billis in the volume’s introduction, these authors start by reviewing the contextual pressures for faith-based organizations to hybridize and present key definitional and conceptual matters, both against the comparative backdrop of the distinctive characteristics of TSOs and social welfare service delivery. The authors use evidence from Cnaan’s 2002 U.S. congregational study (indicating that no similar U.K. data set exists) and outline a move along Billis’s hybridity zones from highly associational and congregationally tied forms to a variant form with greater separation from the congregation, more independent governance, and greater pressures from external parties, such as noncongregational funders. They conclude that faith-based organizations may be a special case, with some evidence of resistance to the demands for bureaucratization seen in the variant and most hybridized form as well as some capacity constraints.

Mike Aiken moves the application of hybridity into a context where market forces are the dominant pressure, in his chapter 8 focus on “Social enterprises: Challenges from the field.” Though social enterprise is probably the most well studied and previously theorized of the volume’s topics, Aiken is well-placed to do this given his vast practical experience and recent research thrust in this arena. Using three “integration cases” from a range of European contexts, Aiken highlights the important matter of ownership and places the three organizational cases in three of Billis’s zones of hybridity. Aiken’s masterful application points to utility of Billis’s theory and will be helpful to others wishing to give serious thought to organizational life and related implications of hybridity of action.

In Chapter 11, “Encountering hybridity: Lessons from individual experiences,” David Lewis moves away from the structural analysis seen in the previous chapters to focus on the perceptions and realities from organizational life as people experience the complexities of hybridization. Drawing data from a comparative research project that examined individuals whose career trajectories have crossed the third and public sectors, he explores internal organizational aspects of sector blurring and related tensions as well as a series of macro-level observations of existing boundaries between sectors. He provides important insights into aspects of learning and creativity in the hybrid context.

“Revisiting the key challenges: Hybridity, ownership and change” in chapter 12, David Billis returns to the key challenges of hybridity outlined in chapter 1, uses the key findings from the case studies, and puts forth a refined typology that contributes to a broader understanding of ownership and accountability in hybrid TSOs. The two-by-two typology is presented in Table 12.1 (p 241), along the dimensions of shallow versus entrenched states of hybridity and organic versus enacted geneses.

Overall, this volume provides a useful and comprehensive review of the social policy and service delivery trends over the past 50 years that have given rise to increasing hybridity. Billis carefully parses out key concepts and develops a tentative theory of hybrid organizational forms, a crucial contribution to this body of literature. But it doesn’t stop there. Through a series of empirical explorations and applications, this volume results in a refined typology and a set of tentative causal directions for future testing and refinement. Clearly this testing is going on in practice and policy as this book, this review, and your reading of this review have taken place. And therein lies the true strength of this timely volume: its import for a diversity of actors and interests in this move toward hybridization and its future happenings, academics, practitioners, students, policy makers, funders, and students of TSOs, sectoral boundaries, and hybrids alike. We now have a clearer lexicon and a clearer analytic framework to guide our exploration.

The only real limitation is that the focus is largely in the context of the United Kingdom, but even then one shouldn’t quarrel much, as Billis and the chapter authors are careful to point to both the limitations and the similarities for comparison to other national contexts. And implicit in several chapters (perhaps most explicit in chapter 9), were this volume about the U.S. context, one might have seen a special focus on hybridization about charitable purpose and political activity, an area of debate and scholarship well underway. That said, the U.K. focus provides a more unitary social policy context for this exploration that is highly satisfying, and a coherent analytic framework for future comparative inquiry.