Hybrid futures for public governance and management
2024 brings the International Research Society for Public Management (IRSPM) conference to Tampere, Finland. To celebrate the relationship between IRSPM and Public Management Review (PMR), we provide this virtual collection in which we place the spotlight on the theme of the conference: Hybrid futures. The collection brings together 28 papers published in PMR in the past 20 years which specifically refer to hybridity in their title, abstract or keywords, and which advance in some way knowledge of hybrid organising.
Hybrid organizing refers to a fusion of formal and informal frameworks and governance structures from the public, private, and voluntary sectors, united to tackle societal issues (Vakkuri and Johanson 2020, Grossi et al., 2022). State-owned enterprises, municipal corporations, social enterprises, public-private partnerships, and the evolving roles of professions are organisational manifestations of hybridity. These entities strive to establish their legitimacy by utilising governance frameworks from various sectors (Battiliana and Lee, 2014; Smith and Besharov, 2019).
This virtual collection represents a diversity of authors, institutions, approaches, and methods. Articles also cover a range of topics, the dominant ones (i.e. each containing a minimum of 5 papers from our collection) including hybrid professionalism and roles, hybrid modes of governance, and institutional configurations. In terms of growth of the theme across the years, we note only two papers published before 2010, with around half of papers (15) published since 2020.
Taken together, these articles illustrate the excellent work and an upward trajectory of research on this theme. They also demonstrate PMR’s unique position in relation to publishing hybridity-related research, in the past, now and in the future. Our hope is that this collection provides the reader with a useful introduction to hybrid organizing and a glimpse into hybrid futures for public governance and management.
Edited by
