Social Innovation Thriving on Hybridity? Lessons from a Street Paper Project for People Experiencing Homelessness in Germany

Abstract This article depicts the chemistry and trajectory of a street paper project involving people experiencing homelessness in Germany. More generally, it seeks to examine implications of hybrid approaches to prosocial organising which various initiatives throughout the Western world have adopted during the last decades to achieve social innovation in an entrepreneurial way. The analysis builds on an embedded case study and a distinctive conceptual framework which combines institutionalist and praxeologic perspectives on modern organisations. The focus lies on how, in the course of time, the project under study processes various institutional logics and how the latter become intermingled ‘in action’. It is shown that, with the enactment of references from different ‘social worlds’, hybrid prosocial organising can feed into a robust organisational model. However, the en route encounter of disparate logics has paradoxical implications and is prone to undermine the model’s effectiveness. With the enactment of hybridity, ‘first-order’ success in terms of organisational survival comes with severe limitations concerning the ambition of crossing institutional boundaries for meeting the project’s key mission. Ironically, dynamics in and around the organisation tend to stabilise a settlement which hybrid ‘prosocial organising’ seeks to tackle.