Jason Jay
MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Managing paradoxes in hybrid organizing
jjay@mit.edu

Jason Jay is a doctoral student in the Organization Studies Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and works as a researcher, teacher, writer, and consultant. His passion is in fostering learning and innovation within and across organizations to help realize a sustainable future. His dissertation research examines the challenges of cross-sectoral collaboration in promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy at the municipal level. As a research partner of the Sustainable Food Lab, he has written case studies of company-NGO collaboration to foster sustainable and equitable agriculture in the developing world, and plans to examine the institutional evolution of sustainable food. Jason has consulted on systems thinking, leadership development, and organizational change in international corporations and NGOs including BP, the World Bank, and the Instituto Libertad y Democracia. In 2008, Jason co-developed the MIT Leadership Lab course with Peter Senge and Wanda Orlikowski, combining classroom learning on sustainability and leadership with action learning on real-world projects with partner organizations. Jason now serves as a project coach and teaching assistant for the course. Alongside his research and teaching, Jason has been active in improving the energy and environmental footprint of the MIT campus by founding the MIT Generator and the Greening MIT community engagement campaign, and serving as founding member of the Campus Energy "Walk the Talk" Task Force.
Prior to MIT, Jason ran an Internet startup, traveled around the world, taught kindergarten in a progressive preschool, and worked as a consultant with Dialogos International. He holds an AB in Psychology and Masters in Education from Harvard University, where he focused on technologies to support collaborative learning. He lives with his wife in the South End of Boston, MA.

Managing paradoxes in hybrid organizing

The need for new solutions to global sustainability challenges has led entrepreneurs from the private, public, and civil society sectors to pursue cross-sectoral alliances and other hybrid organizing strategies. Pragmatic approaches to researching and theorizing such alliances have called for an acknowledgement of the tensions underlying them while offering strategies for navigating those tensions. In this theory-building case study of the Cambridge Energy Alliance, I identify three key paradoxes - of hybrid identity, of service, and of glocal identity. I draw on literature about paradoxes of organizational life to illuminate the need for a sophisticated approach to such paradoxes on the part of practitioners, and suggest that successful navigation of paradoxes by leadership teams may be an important driver of effectiveness in hybrid organizing.