4th July 2021 Hybrid organising in the sharing economy: A case study of Couchsurfing.com Author: Feriel Bouricha Student number: 6668623 E-mail:
[email protected] Degree: MSc Innovation Sciences Supervisor: Dr.Taneli Vaskelainen Second reader: Prof.Dr.Koen Frenken Abstract In the past few years there has been an increase in hybrid organisations. Hybrid organisations are characterised by their tendency to combine opposing organisational elements, such as corporate elements with a societal mission. Their inherent complexity results in internal conflicts between hybrid identities, and these conflicts affect the extent to which the opposing organisational goal are sustained over time. Sharing Economy (SE) organisations engage in hybrid organising as they often operate within contradicting logics. The extant literature has investigated the hybridity of SE organisations from an institutional logics perspective, yet little attention has been given on how hybridity manifests at an internal level. This thesis fills this knowledge gap by examining the impact of the identity conflicts that result from the hybridisation process of Couchsurfing (CS), a mission-oriented free accommodation sharing platform. For this, a qualitative analysis of archival data that spans the period between 2006 and 2020 and interviews with former CS volunteers are conducted to identify the identities that shaped tensions in the organisation of the platform’s hybridity. The main findings suggest that the identity at CS shifted over time from a uniform community identity, to three main identities. The identified identities: Community, Missionary and Corporate were found to conflict over time on three main dimensions these being a conflict over the source of authority of the platform, the role of growth of traffic on the platform, and the role of monetisation.