Keywords

Introduction

As long as the military has existed, people have debated about changing and further developing the armed forces (e.g., Segal and Wechsler Segal 1983). There was always the push for change, i.e., the pressure on military organizations to become bigger, faster, stronger, more efficient and cost-effective, technologically more advanced, more resilient, and in fact more lethal than adversaries. Also, there were views that pointed at the variation and development in tasks the military was set to do. Does the military have specific, narrowly described tasks, or should the military do everything (Brooks 2016)? And there were different and varying views about which people should conduct military tasks. Men of course in the first place, as the interest among women to become a soldier has been comparatively limited. But which men? Conscripts? Volunteers? Perhaps military personnel from other nations than one’s own? People outside the military such as reserve soldiers? Perhaps even people who are employed by for-profit organizations, a new sort of mercenary soldiers? Questions and debates all over.

However, in concordance with analyses of organizations in general (Hannan and Freeman 1984), there have also always been contradicting voices that stressed the importance of stability and the importance of not changing the military. Those voices argue that the military core is unique and good as it is, and that its unwavering, stable presence and structure are essential for the security and well-being of nation and citizens. Such message was voiced even fairly recently in an academic journal, albeit not without criticism (Hasselbladh and Yden 2020; Soeters 2022).

But such a countercurrent does not preclude that military organizations have gradually developed, so it seems, into rather normal, conventional organizations (e.g., Norheim-Martinsen 2016). If this is true, then it must also be true that military organizations are facing similar pressures to transformation and innovation as civilian organizations do (Holmberg and Alvinus 2019). After all, all organizations including the military are influenced by external constraints and opportunities (Pfeffer and Salancik 2003; Soeters 2020).

In most recent years, organizations see themselves confronted with competing institutional, regulatory demands from the outside world and corresponding incongruous pressures on their identity. Most importantly, nonprofit and public organizations experience the urge to become more aware of the business options of their activities. New public management has been a key word in this regard since the 1980s (e.g., Denis et al. 2015). To become more effective, public organizations seek ways to learn from managerial approaches in for-profit companies. On the other hand, profit organizations feel the need to express their social responsibilities such as developing inclusive human resources policies and becoming more aware of challenges concerning the environment and sustainability. Some of these tendencies are the result of changing sociopolitical values and insights in societies at large, whereas some are the palpable consequences of laws and regulations at different levels of public administration. This is managing in the “new normal” (Ahlstrom et al. 2020).

These developments in the civilian world do not leave military organizations unaffected. The military, as a public organization per se, feels the urge to become more efficient and cost-effective, but at the same time more flexible and adaptive to respond to the continuously changing demands they face during the preparation, continuation, and ending of operations. The character of conflicts changes all the time, which requires the military to be aware of the need to adjust according to the circumstances. And indeed, the military (particularly in the western hemisphere) also needs to demonstrate social, ethical, and environmental responsibilities. Hence, the emergence of hybrid organizing in the military domain. This asks for academic and professional attention, providing this is the aim of this chapter.

The chapter starts with an overview of the theoretical insights that have been developed in organization studies with respect to hybrid organizing. Thereafter, we will turn to the military in its changing task environment, after which we will discern various dimensions of hybrid organizing in today’s military. We will close with a sketch of solutions and conclusions to deal with the challenges that ceaselessly arise in this connection.

What Is Hybrid About Hybrid Organizing?

Organizational hybridity can be defined as: “the mixing of core organizational elements that would not conventionally belong together” (Battilana et al. 2017: 138). Core organizational elements in this context may be equalized with identities, organizational forms, and institutional logics within the organization. This latter concept goes back to the idea of the French organizational sociologist Lucien Karpik, who as early as the 1970s spoke about logiques d’action of large industrial firms. He used this concept to demonstrate the differentiated ways in which big companies operate according to their preferred logic(s) of action, be they power related, money oriented, innovative, adaptive, technical, production focused, or prestige oriented (Karpik 1972: 89).

Baccharach, Bamberger, and Sonnenstuhl (1996) applied this idea in their analysis of an organizational transformation process in the airline industry. They discerned different logics of actions at different levels of the organization. Due to changes in the organization’s environment leading to deregulation, top management introduced changes in an airline carrier to increase cost-effectiveness. They did so by speeding up actions on the ground and in the air and through mergers with other firms. In response, middle management and unions increasingly became concerned about the impact of work pressure and job uncertainties on the mental well-being of their workers (in particular the flight attendants). They adopted a different, confrontational logic of action, including engaging in real labor disputes. This caused serious troubles, which led management and operators to seek ways of cautious cooperation, in the end heading to stronger forms of cooperation between top management and lower levels in a sort of brittle coalition. This way the two unalike logics were aligned.

This example from the US airline business demonstrates that institutional logics refer to different motivations, identities, and societal rationalities – different organizational philosophies so to speak. These express themselves in the organization’s goals, strategies, forms, and authority structures, as influenced by the organization’s context and regulatory environment. One definition refers to institutional logics as “socially constructed historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs and rules” (Thornton and Ocasio 1999: 80). Defined as such, the idea of institutional logics is very close to the concept of organizational cultures. But, in particular, the connection with laws, regulations, and grand politics as well as its emphasis of the organization’s raison d’être makes the idea of institutional logics somewhat different from the concept of culture. Yet, the two concepts are clearly related (e.g., Hinings 2012).

As said, hybrid organizing particularly refers to the coming together in one organization of different, oftentimes competing, institutional logics. Today, this frequently relates to the encounter of business logics (e.g., efficiency and profitability) and public logics (e.g., sustainability, inclusiveness, and social equality) in one and the same organization. In previous days, actually not so long ago, it was said that the commercial and the public logic are really different philosophies, and that never the two would meet because “monstrous hybrids” would result (Jacobs 1992). In this view, at the one side, there is the “commercial moral syndrome,” in which it is important to shun the use of force, to come to voluntary agreements, to be efficient, thrifty, and optimistic, and to invest for productive purposes. At the other hand, there is the “guardian moral syndrome,” in which it is essential to shun trading, exert prowess, be loyal to and respect hierarchy, and show fortitude (Jacobs 1992).

Indeed, managerial attitudes at both sides seem to differ considerably (Noordergraaf and Stewart 2000), but nowadays, they seem to diverge less than say twenty-five or more years ago. In fact, in today’s world the two domains do meet, and quite often too. This is not without reason: There are benefits to be gained by hybridity such as more resources, more innovation, and more creativity in the organization (Battilana et al. 2017: 139). Public or social organizations, for instance, may be able to acquire funding from market investors, whereas for-profit organizations may benefit from having a profile of social and environmental awareness. However, hybridity in organizations may also come with negative side effects. If this happens, organizations become “by nature arenas of contradiction” (Pache and Santos 2013), possibly creating internal conflicts, conflicts of interest, competition, and a loss of external legitimation (Battilana et al. 2017: 139).

A clear and often mentioned example of hybrid organizations refers to the phenomenon of social enterprise, an example of which can be found in the field of job placement. During the emergence of the so-called welfare state in the 1950s and later, job placement was an affair of public agencies. Later, as of the 1980s, commercial employment agencies gained more and more impact threatening the former public labor market agencies to become more or less redundant. In some countries one has tried to integrate both types of agencies into one, which came about by selectively coupling intact practices from each logic, not by mixing or blending them (Pache and Santos 2010, 2013; Pache and Thornton 2021). Another example of organizations being confronted with different logics and demands from the outside world are hospitals that are pressurized to become more efficient and commercial, making the mere professional side of medicine less prominent. This leads to tensions and challenges due to the coming together of different organizational logics and professional identities – medical doctors versus cost accounting managers so to speak (Haveman and Gualtieri 2017). Similar tensions have been observed between professional musicians and the managers of a symphony orchestra, to give another example (Glynn 2000).

A particular example of hybrid organizing has emerged in the phenomenon of the so-called extended enterprise. This concept refers to firms that develop strong ties with their suppliers and key customers in order to increase general effectiveness, decrease total systems costs, and to gain more flexibility and better quality and customer acceptance (Spekman and Davis 2016). This concept also includes considerations of risk. Risk sharing (of investments, for example) is one of the side goals of the concept of the extended enterprise. Another important goal is to increase the organization’s potential to adapt to varying circumstances, for instance varying degrees of demand. At some point of time, more output may be needed than at other times. The capability to increase or decrease production or servicing capabilities on a rather short notice is an important asset of the extended enterprise. No matter how promising, all this does not come without challenges: Barriers to collaborations may emerge because of unwillingness among partnering organizations to share information, a lack of trust, perceptions of absence of mutuality and symmetry, and doubt about the fairness of benefits, costs, and risk sharing (Spekman and Davis 2016: 43). Clearly, managing hybridity does not come easy.

Hybridity-Related Challenges in the Military

The military is used to work with dissimilar logics of action, identities, and structures in the organization as they consist of services that are essentially different because of the physical dimensions and technologies they work with. Operations on the ground are essentially different from air forces’ missions (e.g., Mastroianni 2005), not to mention the differences between land operations and military actions on the seas and oceans, or in cyber and space. But these differences have existed for long, and they are incorporated, institutionalized so to speak, in the overall military organization and its cultures (e.g., Soeters 2021). Also, the differences between peace and crisis/war conditions have been known and dealt with since ages, just like the differences between combat and support units. More recent and challenging at the moment, however, are the following five forms of hybridity.

  1. 1.

    Hybridity in task orientation: conventional troops and special forces

    In response to the rise of high-impact terrorist attacks, such as on 11 September 2001 in New York and Washington D.C., politicians worldwide have boosted the capabilities of special forces in the military. Much more than regular forces, special forces are seen as proper means to combat dispersed terrorist networks that operate internationally with terrifying and lethal effect. Special forces’ resources and workforces have increased substantially, and their importance has grown over the past decades (Glicken Turnley et al. 2018). Special operations forces (SOFs) know relatively flat hierarchies; they are smaller, more flexible, lighter on their feet, and they can act more quickly and adapt easier to changing circumstances. Hence, they are considered to be better intelligence gatherers and more apt strikers, which makes them more suited to stop terrorists waiting and preparing to execute their deadly plans.

    The “rise of SOF power” does not come without new concerns, however. For sure, SOFs have their own logics of action that do not directly align with the conventional forces’ way of doing things. Growing SOF power therefore creates more hybridity in the military, and it enhances the possibility of collisions within the military organization, with possibly severe operational consequences (Horn 2004).

    SOF’s time orientation, for instance, is different from conventional troops’ time horizon, and so is their focus on secrecy. As a result, the communication and distribution of important operational information is well developed among the special forces themselves, but less so between the special and regular forces. Simply put, the SOF operators trust only themselves. This occurs even if the SOF and regular HQs are more or less adjacent to one another, such as at the time in Kabul during the Afghanistan operations (Resteigne and van den Bogaert 2017). It may lead to conventional forces not knowing what the SOFs are doing at the same time, in the same area of operations.

    Another concern is the lack of civilian and political control. SOF operations, of course not all of them, may escape the attention of politicians because they are kept secret in order to increase the chances of success. This makes sense. Yet, the more secrecy there is in military operations, the less effective civilian and political control is likely to be. A third effect of this kind of hybridity in the military organization relates to the internal competition for funding. As SOFs are seen as more effective, they tend to receive relatively more resources to grow their organizations and conduct more operations. This may come at the expense of conventional troops’ resources and hence create feelings of relative deprivation among them. A final concern is of a cultural nature. In SOF units, external discipline (attire and saluting) seems laxer, which may irritate conventional forces. Also, respect for conventional forces leaders seems less well developed among SOF operators, as they are trained in a cult of elitism and exclusivity (Horn 2004: 9). This relates back to the observation that SOFs trust only themselves.

  2. 2.

    Hybridity in national and operational military orientation

    A second, fairly recent form of hybridity in military organizations relates to the growing interconnectivity of troops from various countries in operations. The multinational character of military organizing as standing forces, but more explicitly in large-sized exercises and operations, is on the rise, and this development is unlikely to disappear. Sharing costs, risks, and personnel, and gaining more general external legitimacy are the main benefits of the increasing multinational character of military affairs. About this development and its corresponding challenges, a lot has been written (e.g., Soeters 2021; Ruffa and Rietjens 2023), which does not need to be repeated here. Clearly, the more this form of hybridity gets familiar, the more the challenges and problematic sides may be expected to minimize. Experience does it. Yet, there is one issue that asks for special attention in the context of managing hybridity.

    In the footsteps of others, the American scholar Travis (2020) distinguishes two views of security, named “absolutist” and “pragmatist.” These views translate into operational styles and preferences of the military in a nation. The “absolutist” view or operational style stresses the perpetuity of hostile threats and the need to eliminate those. This view is likely to result in large investments in heavy weaponry as well as in regular campaigns or invasions in order to retaliate, dominate, or conquer others’ areas. Victories are the ultimate aim and the definition of military success. It is, if one wishes, the military old style. The “pragmatist” view or operational style, on the other hand, sees the military as one instrument next to others in the domain of international relations. Nations that prefer the “pragmatist” approach are more reluctant to use military means to solve international problems. If military means are used, this is likely to be done in a restrained manner, such as in the participation in stabilization operations and UN missions.

    This distinction is important because, as it seems, some nations are more disposed to the “absolutist” view, and others seem to be more inclined toward the “pragmatist” view. Nations that came out of World War II victoriously, such as the USA, the UK, and Russia – the decision-makers about Europe post-World War II at the Potsdamer Conference in the summer of 1945 – tend to prefer the “absolutist” view. This can be deduced from their actions over the last couple of decades and from their relatively high expenditures for the military. Other countries, such as most continental European countries, are more inclined to the other “pragmatist” view and approach (Soeters 2021). This obviously creates differences and the challenges that come along with hybridity in multinational military cooperation: internal arguments over goals, competences and capabilities, prestige battles, loss of external legitimacy, and ambiguity in decision-making about what needs to be done.

    Most likely, a convergence between those two views and styles will occur in alliances of collaborating national forces, such as NATO. Yet, for the time being, nation-related hybridity seems to remain. During the operations in Afghanistan, this type of hybridity manifested itself in a task division that reflected the different national views – the “absolutist” national forces from Anglo-Saxon countries predominantly doing the combat job in Southern Afghanistan, whereas the “pragmatists” mainly carried the burden of the other jobs. Yet, as a consequence of Russia’s invasion in Ukraine in early 2022, most nations in continental Europe became convinced that a more classical, “absolutist” approach was inevitable, including a sharp rise of budgets for the military in almost all of these countries. Hence, for the moment NATO-wide emphasis is balancing toward “absolutist” thinking. This may be temporary, though.

  3. 3.

    Hybridity in actor orientation: civil-military cooperation

    Fitting more in a “pragmatist” view of the military are peacekeeping and stabilization missions and relief operations in times of war, crisis, and disaster. Such missions are likely to benefit from the military working together with civilian organizations (e.g., Lucius and Rietjens 2016). Such partnering is particularly useful in the field of refugee and disaster relief (in camps for instance), providing immediate assistance, more specifically shelter and health care as well as food and water distribution; in a longer timeframe civil-military cooperation is also valuable in (re)constructing physical infrastructure as well as repairing the social and political fabric of a nation. In general, these civilian parties are nongovernmental organizations, abbreviated as NGOs. Such civilian organizations may have an international and/or Western background, such as the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders. But such civilian organizations may very well also have a host-national background. The host-national character of partnering organizations is likely to provide substantial benefits because it narrows the gap with the beneficiaries. Yet, it also often enlarges the dynamics of hybridity in civil-military working relations because of language and other cultural issues.

    A lot has been said before about the challenges that come along with getting civilian and military organizations working together. This obviously starts with the awareness that one needs each other to get the job done. The military, for example, can provide logistics facilities to bring people and material where they are needed or best placed. From there on, civilian organizations can take up the job that needs to be done. But even if all stakeholders are aware of this interdependence and see the benefits of partnering, which is not always the case, challenges remain. Often controversies emerge with regard to the demarcation of working domains, the formulation of operational goals, the visibility of forceful means, and general views about how things are supposed to be fixed. Reaching consensus about tasks and approaches is a prerequisite for civil-military cooperation to be successful (e.g., Bollen 2002). This form of managing hybridity in an organizational configuration, such as in a network of collaborating organizations, is challenging but not impossible. Many experiences all over the planet demonstrate how successful such cooperation may be. As said elsewhere, civil-military cooperation is a matter of “divergent interests, yet convergent action” (Lucius and Rietjens 2016: 169 ff.). Hybridity in such civil-military cooperation requires that coordination takes place with trust and control, mechanisms that seem opposite but can work complementary and in a mutually reinforcing way (Kalkman and de Waard 2017).

    One more remark needs to be made about national forces with an “absolutist” view needing to work with national forces with a “pragmatist” view as well as with civilian organizations. It is no secret that the US forces prefer combat and real war fighting and have much less feeling with operations other than war, such as stabilization or peacekeeping missions (e.g., McFate 2018: 20 ff.). Except for providing immediate disaster relief, US forces (and they are not the only ones) are not really comfortable with more structural civilian-military cooperation such as a number of European allies tried to achieve in Afghanistan (e.g., Beeres et al. 2012). For US forces, this type of multiple hybridity, distracting from “real combat,” simply was, and probably still is, a bridge too far.

  4. 4.

    Hybridity in personnel: professional military, reserve military, and civilian personnel

    Because the draft system has been abolished in most Western armed forces, professional military personnel has become the main element of the military’s human resources. However, due to the increasingly felt need for the military to intervene in all sorts of activities (Brooks 2016), professional military personnel are oftentimes overburdened; they are also too expensive for mundane jobs, and sometimes not qualified enough to provide the expertise knowledge that is required (e.g., information technology, general technology, and cost accounting). In order to conduct all the actions that are asked for, the military organization feels the need to work according to the notion of the total or adaptive force. This notion accentuates that the military’s human resources are more than the professional military core. The military just as much relies on reserve personnel and civilian personnel. In terms of human resources management (HRM), this creates hybridity.

    Although reserve personnel are often former professional military (wo)men, they are likely to have developed new interests, skills and positions after they have left the military. They can be referred to as transmigrants moving between the civilian and military organization (Lomsky-Feder, Nazit and Ben-Ari 2008). Reserve personnel have one leg in the military organization and the other in civilian working life. This provides them with insights and views that may differ from professional military personnel, and, in fact, they may have a somewhat ambiguous attitude toward what the military traditionally does and how it behaves. Depending on the situation, this may work out as a weakness or a strength; it is a weakness if stability and consistency is required; it is a strength if innovation, new ways of doing things, is needed because old approaches do not suffice to clear the job. In any case, it is about managing hybridity. Reserve personnel may also see the military service as “serious leisure” giving them a legitimation to stay away from family and household responsibilities (Castignani and Basham 2021). This is not unproblematic either, as it questions the reserve soldiers’ real motivation to participate in the military during “serious operations.”

    Another category on which the military organization heavily relies is civilian personnel. Civilian personnel are employed by defense organizations to conduct general tasks that are not specifically military, such as administrative or cleaning jobs, or that, on the contrary, require very specific expertise that the military is unable to provide for themselves; IT personnel or researchers, for example. In general, military and civilian personnel face different operational, general work and wage conditions. It is important for military organizations to deal with this specific type of hybridity in a manner that increases feelings of fairness among both, indispensable, categories of the total defense work force (Goldenberg, Andres and Resteigne 2016).

  5. 5.

    Hybridity in money orientation: public and private

    This probably is the most difficult form of hybrid organizing in the military, as it is as new as controversial as we saw before (Jacobs 1992). Contract soldiering per se is not a new occurrence, as we have seen merchant soldiers acting in military operations already centuries ago. Yet, the mixing of contract soldiering within ordinary military operations is a rather recent phenomenon. This started with the outsourcing of specific military tasks in operations to private military companies (PMCs), which became a common practice in the US military – but not only there. The logic of this approach relates to the perceived benefits of increased flexibility (easier inception and termination of actions and contracts). It also relates to the fact that the costs for PMCs do not necessarily burden the governmental defense budget, and a final aspect is the reduced political visibility of the PMCs’ decision-making and conduct (Schaub and Kelty 2016; Soeters 2020: 101–103). The latter two aspects, for instance, play a large role in the activities of the so-called Wagner Group financed by the Russian State. This latter organization also showed that things may go out of hand, in a way that the sponsors may not like.

    Here, the concept of the extended enterprise (Spekman and Davis 2016) is particularly relevant for the military. As said, this concept refers to the idea that organizations no longer can only rely on their own resources but need to incorporate external partners to respond to changing external demands. As we saw in the previous point, this firstly leads to the use of reserve soldiers, which is a phenomenon on the rise. As to health care services, for instance, most military forces have a need to expand or shrink their medical capabilities according to the operational circumstances. When there is an urgent need, reserve medical personnel that ordinarily works for civilian hospitals are used to fill the gaps in operations overseas. For this to be possible, contracts with civilian health care providers in the parent society, medical centers or hospitals, are signed, which obviously creates money issues. The idea of the extended enterprise – or total force in the military – particularly applies to cooperating with commercial partners in supply chains that give organizations the flexibility to grow or shrink their capabilities according to the demands of the time. For the military, this may refer to work activities in the field of guarding and protecting premises, transports, and logistics, and the maintenance of devices, such as vehicles and IT systems. Working with such business contractors does not come without problems, though. These may even have serious operational consequences. If business contractors operate satellites that are needed for missiles to target specific hostile goals, and for whatever reason they refuse to collaborate, managing hybridity in the military becomes a very urgent matter. More in general, Lindy Heinecken (2014) expressed doubts about the advantages that commercial partners in the military are said to have. One small incident with fairly large political consequences may illustrate the point.

    Soeters, de Gooijer, van Fenema, and Oliveira (2021) analyzed an incident involving a reserve officer deployed by the Netherlands army to the operations in Afghanistan. In civilian life he was an expert in information technology working for a commercial company. During his deployment he was double employed, so to speak. This of course was organizational hybridity par excellence. The assignment he had received for his mission was exactly in his field of expertise: to make an inventory of the IT systems in the area of operations and suggest ways to improve its performance. His report and recommendations were well received by the military and the MOD. Yet, this positivity suddenly changed when a TV documentary was broadcasted that presented this case as an example of unwanted intermingling of commercial and public affairs. The reserve officer was said to favor the company that employed him by recommending improvements that could only be done by companies such as his employer. The TV program created enormous upheaval nationwide as well as in parliament. Almost in panic, the minister of defense instigated a legal investigation and immediately stopped the working relations with the company that had provided the reserve officer. Other IT companies, in turn, became reluctant to work with the defense organization, making the already substantial IT challenges in the defense organization even more problematic. The reserve officer was discharged from his military duties but he nor his company were found guilty of fraud. Obviously, this crisis ruined the confluence of private and public capabilities in the field of IT-related defense, both at home and overseas (Soeters, de Gooijer, van Fenema and Oliveira 2021: 176).

So far, our description of hybridity-related challenges in military organizations or configurations of collaborating military organizations occurring as a consequence of perpetually changing and often conflicting demands from the outside world. For sure, these are not the only challenges in this regard, but they certainly are among the most impactful developments to date. The question then is how to manage these developments and prevent dramas as the one we just saw.

Solutions and Conclusions

There are several ways for organizations, including military organizations, to come to grips with conflicting demands from the outside world necessitating the emergence of hybrid forms of organizing. It urges the military to become an adaptive organization. For sure, handling the challenges and opportunities of hybrid organizing is a test in itself.

There is one factor that diminishes the challenges related to hybridity in the military organization occurring due to changing external conditions: This is a new change of those external conditions themselves. To make this more tangible, one only needs to remind that the rather sudden rise of SOFs, creating and accelerating new forms of hybridity in the organization, was related to the threat of dispersed terrorist networks. Yet, with Russia’s invasion in the Ukraine in 2022, it became immediately apparent that the capabilities of conventional, regular forces are still enormously significant, hence boosting those troops’ feeling of relevance and mounting their material and human resources. The latter, the sudden rise of financial means for the military since 2022, may also lessen the need to seek collaboration with for-profit organizations. Now again, the military have more income to better arrange for their own supplies, expertise, and personnel. This does not imply that these forms of hybridity are fully disappearing, but the intensity and scope of the challenges are likely to decline, at least somewhat.

Yet, other reasons and forms of hybridity tend to remain in the military in full scope, and they are as beneficial yet challenging as before. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to possibilities to manage the problematic sides of hybridity, such as internal competition and conflict, political battlefields inside the organization, and the loss of external legitimacy.

  1. (a)

    Plural governance. There are several ways to come to grips with the challenges that come along with managing organizational hybridity (Mair et al. 2015). First, organizations may opt for just one of the competing logics, leaving the other options for what they are. In case of social enterprises that are confronted with pressures to commercialize, these organizations may either go for their original social charter or completely shift toward commercialization. In such case, hybridity no longer exists as finding a compromise or an adequate balance between conflicting external demands or expectations is difficult (Mair et al. 2015: 730). If one actively rejects choosing between different logics – for instance because choosing is impossible – other options emerge (Mair et al. 2015: 731). Generally speaking, there are integration and differentiation strategies. Integration refers to the yielding of novel organizational forms and innovative products by synthesis of seemingly incompatible elements that become legitimized institutions in their own right (Glynn et al. 2021: 53). This approach may be effective but may come with strains in and among people in the organization. Differentiation strategies, on the other hand, allow space for different departments, units, or groups in the organization to perform according to their own values, logics, practices, and insights (Battillana et al. 2017: 145 ff.). The latter is close to what has been referred to as organizational ambidexterity, which is being good at two different things – stable exploitation and innovative exploration – at the same time (O’Reilly III and Tushman 2008). As explained before, such differentiation has existed in the military for long, as a means to achieve more organizational and operational flexibility (Shields and Travis 2017). Differentiation is something the military bureaucracy is traditionally good at. But this comes with a cost: Managing the military in different services works well, but not when modern operations require the combined deployment and use of weapons systems. Hence, differentiation in itself can never be the only solution. Integration remains a challenge to cope with.

  2. (b)

    Organizational demography. This approach stresses the notion that changing organizations can best be done by changing who is in the organization instead of changing the people in the organization (Pfeffer 1985). This is an important idea, also for the military. It is no secret that military commanders are predominantly men who were trained in military academies and promoted through the own military ranks. This is likely to create uniformity in thinking and acting, from junior to senior; it is likely to create a certain inner directness that the military can ill afford to maintain in the future. The current awareness of the benefits of diversity may be particularly pertinent here (e.g., Soeters 2020: 188 ff.). Quite some people are convinced that on average women have a larger feeling for pragmatist instead of absolutist thinking, not only in military affairs, but more in general (Shields et al. 2023). If this is true, then it makes sense to recruit and onboard more women and promote them to higher military ranks with more decision-making power to handle hybridity in the military. But such considerations may also apply more generally. King (2010) in an analysis of the British operations in Afghanistan noticed that the arrival of an unconventional, newly established brigade and its staff (m/f) helped to realize a successful shift in approaching the hostilities and threats in the area of operations (the province of Helmand). The newcomers had previous experience in peacekeeping and stabilization missions as well in civilian domains, which helped to make the “absolutist” warrior approach of the British troops less dominant. This is the strength of reserve personnel and the advantage of rotating personnel among the various components (services, national/international, and types of missions) of the military. To repeat Pfeffer’s statement (1985): Organizational change is more likely to occur by changing who is in the organization than by changing the people in the organization.

  3. (c)

    Living with paradox. Organizational life is full of paradoxes, i.e., apparent contradictions that denote elements that seem logical in isolation but absurd and irrational when appearing simultaneously (Lewis 2000: 760). Examples relate to organizational learning (critiquing and often destroying past understandings to construct innovative, more complex knowledge); to organizing (equilibrating opposing forces in order to encourage commitment, trust, and creativity and maintaining efficiency and order); and to dynamics at the group level (groups becoming more cohesive and influential by valuing the diversity of their members) (Lewis 2000: 765). These examples can also be recognized in the military and can easily be translated to the forms of hybridity we discussed in this chapter before. The challenge here is to capture the enlightening potential of paradoxes. This can be attempted by confronting politicians’ and commanders’ own routines, defenses (and panic!), and learning to explore the natural ebb and flow of tensions in the organizations. Paradoxes may be learned to be seen as thought-provoking challenges in order to examine what tensions exist, why they last, and how such strains can be turned into new opportunities. What appears as counterintuitive and simply wrong may on deeper reflection be inherent aspects of today’s organizational life (Lewis 2000: 774). In connection with demographic management, this is likely to be done more successfully by some than by others. At the end, novel arrangements are not unlikely to be accepted and legitimized by the outside world (Glynn et al. 2021).

If this chapter has contributed to a better understanding of hybrid organizing and managing in the military and how to come to grips with it, it has fulfilled its purpose.

Summary

This chapter aims to provide insights with respect to the simultaneous occurrence of different logics of action, values, and practices in one and the same organization or set of intensively cooperating organizations, in the military domain. This is referred to as organizational hybridity, which is needed to create an adaptive force. Acknowledging that the military organization traditionally has seen such diversity and hybridity in its different services (air, land, sea), the chapter distinguishes five other manifestations of hybridity in the military. These provide new opportunities for better performance in times of perpetually changing and sometimes conflicting external demands, but they also create challenges to prevent inside tensions, unhealthy competition, panic, conflicts, or political battles. Plural governance, different recruiting and onboarding, as well as accepting and making use of the potential strength of organizational paradoxes may help to cope with organizational hybridity in the military.

Cross-References