Straddling the fence ::orchestating meta-organozational hybridity

Pursuing identities, forms, or logics that would not conventionally go together–generally referred to as organizational hybridity–is a phenomenon rapidly expanding among organizations. While literature has studied organizational hybridity as an organizational-level phenomenon, empirically, we have recently seen a proliferation of organizational collectives –so-called meta-organizations –orchestrating hybrid activities beyond the boundaries of the focal firm. In studying the 15-year trajectory of the startup OSCORP, a content management system (CMS) company that embraces commercial open-source tenets, by means of sponsoring a community of companies called OSCOMM, we develop a grounded theoretical model that shifts our attention to these new forms of organizing. Our findings indicate that the nested structure of the meta-organization creates boundary conditions for organizational and collective hybridity to be achieved simultaneously. In capturing three distinct strategic phases of OSCORP, we are able to identify both internal (management choices, product design, and operational functions) and external (relationship type, role attribution, and control allocation) mechanisms that allow us to unpack the dynamics of how meta-organizations and their constituting members jointly achieve organizational hybridity. Consequently, our theoretical model suggests the need for a broader conceptualization of hybrid organizing, while revealing insights into strategies that account for organizational collectives