Converging Winds: Logic Hybridization in the Colorado Wind Energy Field

2016

Jeffery York TIMOTHY J. HARGRAVE Desiree F Pacheco

This study explores the hybridization of field-level logics, a process that integrates previously incompatible logics within an organizational field. Through an inductive study of the wind energy field in Colorado, we find that logic hybridization resulted when social movement organizations (SMOs), electric utility firms, hybrid organizations, and policy makers variously responded to incompatibility between economizing and ecologizing logics. After compromise with electric utilities and efforts to justify wind power in economic terms failed to reduce the dominance of the economizing logic, SMOs switched tactics to promote the ecologizing logic. Once SMOs succeeded in altering the balance of power in the field, hybrid organizations then emerged to legitimize a new set of frames, practices, and arrangements that integrated the previously incompatible logics. Electric utility firms and policy makers then formalized and embedded the new hybridized logic in the field. Our findings suggest that the hybridization of field-level logics is a complex process in which organizational actions and field-level conditions recursively influence each other over time. This process is critical to understanding how entrepreneurs, firms, policy makers, and SMOs each contribute to the emergence of environmentally relevant sectors.

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