At the intersection of business and traditional non-profit organizations, the concept of social enterprise (SE) is a growing organizational phenomenon. With its promise, to blend social impact and commercial goals at the organizational core, the concept carries the high hopes of scholars across research disciplines (Mair & Marti, 2006; Nicholls, 2006) and a heterogeneous group of practitioners in politics, the non-profit sector and the commercial space to create sustainable relief for pressing societal issues through market mechanisms (Dacin, Dacin & Tracey, 2011; Mair & Marti, 2006).
In public as well as academic discourse, social enterprises emerge as popular champions of the idea to create sustainable positive impact for society through business activities.
The attraction of SE and the notion of a positive role of business in society has been growing particularly strong since the early 1990s (Austin et al., 2006; Battilana & Lee, 2014; Mair et al., 2012; Nicholls, 2006; Peredo & McLean, 2006). Moreover, due to its various connotations in different cultural, social, political or academic settings, the research field continues to attract diverse and at times contrary ways to understand what constitutes a SE. Consequently, there is no clear agreement on a single definition. However, despite its various appearances and abounding definitions, common conceptualizations of SE agree, that SEs are organizations that can be characterised by their pursuit of a social mission sustained by commercial activities (Dees, 2001; Mair, 2010; Wry & York, 2017).
With the heart of a charity and the mind of a business, SEs therefore combine multiple, often divergent characteristics of business and charity at the organizational core. Hereby, their long-term sustainability depends on the balanced advancement of business and charity aspects, which are both essential to their organizational success (Battilana & Lee, 2014). In this form, researchers have described SE as a prominent, if not ideal type of hybrid organization (Austin et al., 2006; Bacq and Janssen, 2011; Battilana & Lee, 2014; Wry & York, 2017), whereby Battilana & Lee (2014) portray hybridity in organizations as “the state of being composed through the mixture of disparate parts” (p.400). Hybrid organizations combine established elements in a new way. Here, I refer to hybrid organizations as organizations that integrate a variety of stakeholder needs, which includes striving to fulfil multiple strategic goals simultaneously and for this reason, engaging in divergent activities at the same time (Mair et al., 2015). This new combination of organizational components becomes a central and enduring factor to the strategy and operation of a SE.
The ability to house multiple, often divergent, organizational aspects like forms, logics or identities at their organizational core appears to be a conceptual key feature of what constitutes social enterprises and distinguishes it from the established institutional settings of business and charity from which it collects its building blocks from. Hybridity becomes a key feature through which to gain better insides into the key organizational mechanisms of SE. Summarising, SE is understood as a particular case of hybrid organization that draws from the logics, forms and tools of business and charity (Pache & Santos, 2013; Pache & Santos, 2010). While studies have highlighted how multiple, often divergent organizational forms, identities and institutional logics put pressure on hybrid organizations (Battilana & Lee, 2014) the underlying structures and mechanisms explaining how hybrids organize the twofold tasks of their organization are less well understood.

Addressing this gap, the goal of my dissertation is to extend knowledge on how members and stakeholders of a SE perceive, negotiate and make sense of hybridity, a key defining aspect, at the organizational level. With this in mind, my dissertation carries the title: Two Souls in One Chest – Hybridity & Social Enterprise.