Between Humboldt and Rockefeller: An organization design approach to hybridity in higher education

Higher education institutions (HEI) are maneuvering the competing institutional logics of academia and commerce, which provide widely conflicting bases for legitimacy ascriptions. HEI that try to internalize both competing institutional logics become hybrids, addressing the resulting internal tensions and conflicts through efforts of structural separation or blending. Whereas these generic approaches have been well described, also for HEI, their underlying, constituting organizational design remains unclear. We refer to the general organization design literature to suggest templates for hybrid HEI. Dependent on the relative strength attributed to the two competing logics, respectively, we specify typical organizational designs reflecting separation as well as blending solutions. We embed these hybrid organizational design types with the pure archetypes of both logics and offer implications for research and practice in the HE field. •Investigates the impact of competing institutional logics on higher education institutions (HEI).•Specifies generic hybrid approaches of blending and structural separation for HEI.•Suggests three hybrid HEIs organizational templates under different constellations of institutional logics.