The hybridisation of Russian non-profit organisations

Abstract

In this chapter, we look at the impact of the system of ‘managed democracy’ on nonprofit organisations (NPOs) in the Russian Federation and focus on the way in which the lines between them and the agencies of the state have become increasingly blurred. This development is part of the widespread growth in the creation of hybrid organisations on an international scale (Billis, 2010). Hybridity is the result of organisations crossing sectoral boundaries (Pache and Santos, 2013) to form a combination of the characteristics of two or more sectors. One of the more common forms of hybrid organisation blurs the boundaries between NPOs and the state as the former engages in the delivery of public services that had previously been the role of statutory agencies (Billis, 2010). This blurring of sectoral boundaries between NPOs and state is not simply a transfer of practices but involves more fundamental changes to the way organisations operate (Bromley and Meyer, 2017). It means that organisations attempt to adhere to different, if not competing, institutional logics; the ‘rules’ that govern the various sectors (Battilana and Lee, 2014; Brandsen et al., 2005; Doherty et al., 2014; Pache and Santos, 2010). NPOs might, for example, attempt to marry a third sector logic based on collective ownership, engaging constituencies, altruism, provision of free support and/or democratic leadership with a state bureaucracy logic based on centralised control, rule-based mechanisms for service provision and/or hierarchical structures.