Hybridity and Responsible Leadership in Public Administration

The empirical impulse of the discussion on organizational hybridity in public admini lTation is that in a broad variety of public policy :fields several sector-specific institutional fonn. overlap. Examples arc tax-exempted foundations in the field of education or cience, private v luntary a sociations providing public goods such as socia l ·ervices of various kinds or private goods such as housing provided by pubJi enterprises or cooperatives (cf. in detail Seibel_Ol5a/b. Re ently scho!at of public administration sta.Ite llo explicitly address bybridity as a phenomenon of public organization in general (cf. Denis et al. 20 15). There is good ense in acknO\.vledging hybridity in public administration as a peripl1eral phenomenon relative to the core of cia sic, W berian s tyle bureau racy, whose relevance, however should be neither ignor d nor overstated . At the same time, public enterprises or public-private partnerships, competition and riva lry or participation and civil society inv lvement in the hierarchica l enviromnent of public administration do challenge public adminl lration precisely becau e they deviate from the routines and established patterns of clas ic bureaucracy and the way the laller is being regu lated and managed. l-lybridlty in public administration represents tb irregu lar as oppo ed to the regular, th unpredicwb le relative to the predictable the opaque versus what is tmn parent. and s1TuctmaJ complexity as opposed t the relative ·impHcity of monocrati bureaucra ies. What on ' may deri ve from tlus i that hybridlty in public admlni !:ration create a risk-prone environment that r·duce the likelihood of succe sfuJ copi ng with standard pathologies of conventional bureaucracy and incrca e tbe likelih od of new weaknesse and defici.encle to occur. Hybridity in public administration, so I claim, is a risk generator in its own right that weakens fundamental principles of administrative responsibility as a core ingredient of democratic government. This argument is presented in this paper, based on both theoretical con idet"ltions and an empirical illustration.