In contemporary welfare services the organizational – and learning - landscape is under reconfigu-ration. In a conventional manner of speaking organizations or enterprises is often tripartite in origin: private, public or civic – and this division has naturally been a driving force for research within organizational, learning, work place and civic perspective. Consequently research within these fields of interest have predominantly been situated within one or several of these entities and respective organizational types but lesser attention has been devoted to the intersections or weak boundaries between these three entities. Hybrid organisations – and hybridity – has nevertheless been an in-creasingly phenomenon and these new venues for productivities and learning have been different labeled, for instance public-private collaboration, public-civic-private collaboration and partnerships, social enterprises, social business – and share some common features often identified under the term ‘ hybrid organizations’, although they also differ from each other. Hybridity is originally defined as a cross between two separate races or cultures and hybridity is simply a mixture. As an explicative term, hybridity became a useful tool in forming a fearful discourse of racial mixing that arose toward the end of the 18th Century and developed later into a hybridity theory as a discourse of anti-essentialism and to eliminate essentialist thinking and practices.
In the social enterprise literature Johanna Mair in 2006 defined, “that social enterprises mix the economic principles of the market, redistribution and reciprocity and hybridize their three types of economic exchange so that they work together rather than in isolation from each other” (Mair, 2006:318). Bode, Evers and Schultz from a civic research tradition critically pointed towards the entering af hybrid organisations as features of a specific historic development and tradition and therefore embedded in a context that both entailed the potentials for reconfiguring the conventional organizational landscape but at the same time facing the threat that the very same marked forces that fosters these hybrid organisations could destroy them (Bode, Evers and Schultz, 2006). From yet another field social work Karvinen-Ninikoski points to that “ we used to think about professional expertise as institutionalised and individually mastered specialist knowledge based on scientific evidence and reason. Today the trend is towards de-institutionalisation, hybrid forms of organisation and co-operative mastering of knowing and knowledge production, towards open expertise produced in multi-actor networks (Karvinen-Ninikoski, 2003:12). Consequently, hybrid organisations in human service and health care is part of an encreasing development in welfare systems in many countries – a development seeking to develop an alternative economy, new forms of solidarity, of business and organisational models, of empowerment and democracy, of co-production between professionals and citizens.
In this paper I offer a critical exploration and discussion of new hybrid organizations and discuss the implications for our theoretical and practical informed understanding of learning and learning arenas and demonstrate how hybrid organisations are based on blended learning in multi-functional arenas characterized by
Motives and motivation: individual drives as payment, acknowledgement, making a difference, to be or become a social entrepreneur
Vocational training, peer-to-peer, instructional training, service learning, to become a labor market subject
Democracy and governance: how to participate, govern and voice your opinion, how to take on responsibility
Developing a social enterprise: organisational drives and structures, strategy, negotiate with local partners, authorities
Community work: develop and integrate SE as local business, community development and empowerment, co-develop sustainability
From these analytic strands I generate my conceptualization departing from a landscape of learning concepts and understandings - rich on concepts on transformative leaning such as experi-ential and collaborative learning, social learning, situated or action learning as well as more critical concepts like sociological imagination and critical pedagogy. But learning is equivalent a potent tool of implementation, disciplining and alignment and as such paves the way for numerous welfare strategies and societal transformations. Learning therefore is ambiguous and ambivalent. Hybrid organisations can then be displayed as organisations aiming at human growth and empow-erment, social values through the production af welfare services or products via market dynamics. They offer blended and intersectional learning in multitude learning arenas – in which marginal citizens work alongside with welfare professionals in shared positions and actions, through co-creation and co-production
