Understanding hybridity – A scoping review within the context of social and health care services
To solve complex and wicked problems in a society, attention needs to be given to diversity of actors and institutions (Alford & Head, 2017; Daviter, 2019) and to the functional structures that cross organizational boundaries and a wider ecosystem where different institutional actors work (Roth et al., 2024, p. 1). Reforms in public administration and changes in administrative methods have caused the emergence of new organizational forms, and these are commonly referred to in the research literature as "hybrids" (Skelcher & Smith, 2015, 433). The etymology of hybridity comes from biology, anthropology and technology. In general, hybridity symbolizes the process of mixing two or more things or conflicting elements through a process (Brandsen & Karré, 2011, 828).
Hybridity has been found to occur in many forms in the context of multi-agency within social and health care sector, where hybridity of service system structures has been found to be increasing (NHS, 2014; Van Veghel, 2019). These can be public sector partnerships, quangos, service delivery structures, user-manager public spaces, collaboration forums, various social enterprises or network management systems (Kickert, 2001; Skelcher, 2005; Sørensen & Torfing, 2009). Hybrid arrangements hold great potential for addressing complex societal challenges and creating value across multiple dimensions (Roth et al., 2024). The advantage of a wider hybrid ecosystem is in its ability to utilize the conflicting goals and means of actors (Roth et al., 2024; Vakkuri & Johanson, 2018; 2021a; 2021b). Still, the core understanding and definition of hybridity within administrative and organizational sciences remains empirically imprecise and vague (Skelcher & Smith, 2015, 435), without exact definitions (Powell & Castelli, 2017), thus, providing a research gap to fill.
Through a scoping literature review (Pham et al., 2014; Petus et al., 2015; Tricco et al., 2016) this paper aims to synthesize scientific literature to complement the existing understanding of key theoretical and conceptual features of hybridity in social and health care. Theoretically, this paper focuses on describing key concepts of hybrids through an analysis from the perspective of structure (institutional hybridity and systemic hybridity), agency (organizational hybridity) and activities (hybridity and hybridization). Specifically, this literature review asks what theoretical and conceptual features of hybridity can be identified in the literature on social and health care and in which settings.
The research questions are:
What kind of theoretical and conceptual features can be identified within the hybridity literature?
In what contexts (structure, agency, activities) has hybridity been applied to within research in social and health care?
The preliminary results of the 2. research question shows four dimensions of hybridity in the literature: 1. hybridity as phenomenon and as meanings, 3. hybridity as feature, 4. hybridity as structure and 5. hybridity as activities and as processes.
Some ideas for follow-up research include conceptualizing hybridity in a novel way in the institutional and organizational environment through incorporation of features from current literature in order to clarify the concept and its application.
The main challenge of aiming to define hybridity theoretically and conceptually comes down to impreciseness and vagueness of the concept in the literature. As this requires a knowledge synthesis of the concept that incorporates a range of literature, a scoping review provides a valuable tool to comprehensively summarize and synthesize the key features and definitions that have been presented in the literature, providing direction to future research priorities.
