Hybrid Organizations from the Global South embedded in Global Value Chains (GVCs): Their neglected contribution to Social Innovation

Alternative economic forms are credited with great potential to contribute to social innovation and sustainability transitions. Hybrid organizations, combining multiple institutional logics, emerge in different forms in many regional contexts. There are, however, limited insights on the emergence and unfolding of hybrid organizational fields in different spatial contexts, especially in the spaces of the Global South. This paper contributes to this shortcoming by investigating the institutional dynamics of the emerging field of impact sourcing service providers (ISSPs) in Kenya. Impact sourcing can be considered as a social innovation. These hybrids follow a social mission to promote the integration of disadvantaged youth in the labor market by building IT capabilities, simultaneously striving for financial sustainability for the organization. The findings of this study reveal the multi-scalarity of the field configuring processes; furthermore, they reveal the necessity for Global South hybrids to flexibly combine the weight of both economic and social logics in their business models. This enables them to cope with the double burden of building legitimacy for new practices in the local environment, and the global value chains (GVCs), simultaneously. By combining neo- institutional organization theory, with insights from economic geography and social innovation theory, this paper provides a deeper understanding of the complex institutional dynamics in the emergence and formation of fields of hybrid organizations located in the Global South and their social impacts, enabled due to embeddedness in GVCs.