The Creation of a Hybrid and Innovative Model of Occupational Health Delivery through the Lens of Institutional Entrepreneurship Theory

By applying the lenses of institutional work, this study presents an empirical analysis on how agents create and manage a hybrid virtual organization to provide an innovative solution to the problem of the lack of occupational health (OH) services among small businesses. We specifically focus on how these actors exploit and balance the prescriptions of different logics within this hybrid organization.

Our qualitative study showed that the funders manage this virtual social enterprise through two main strategies: ‘commitment to the social mission’ and ‘support for the social mission’. The first strategy shows how the social mission helped a diverse group of funders and employees to work together as a team. The second strategy assists these actors to grant the maintenance and justify the existence of this novel organization, which provides immense societal benefits but could not support itself financially.

This article shows how a hybrid organizations’ capacity for innovation and societal advantages depends on the ability to rely on multiple logics and simultaneously to shift the attention on the social mission as a catalytic force for its survival.