Exploring the material dimension of cross-sector collaboration in a virtual organization

In the collective scholarly effort to explore the micro-foundations of hybridity and the question of “how hybrid models of organising can be sustained” (Pache & Santos 2013), the material aspect of organizations (the physical and virtual spaces) remains underexplored (Jones et al. 2013, 2017). This article seeks to demonstrate why and how the material aspect of cross-sector organizations needs more attention and how such attention will assist scholars and practitioners in detecting undeveloped potentials or dysfunctional elements of cross-sector organizations. After making the case for a more pronounced material sensitivity in third sector research, I lay out a composite conceptual framework, that integrate a material sensitivity into the institutional logics perspective. Next, based on empirical evidence from a long-term ethnographic study of a multi-sided cross-sector organization that provide virtual tutoring, I show how the material and formal aspects of the organizational context, in interdependence with the interactions of the volunteers sustained the blending (Skelcher & Smith 2015) of two logics: the bureaucratic and entrepreneurial logic, into what I call New Civic Management (NCM). Furthermore, I show how the “civic logic”, that the management tried to cultivate top down (Eliasoph 2009) was blocked (Skelcher & Smith 2015) as an unintended consequence of the way digital technology was implemented in the bureaucratically structured and entrepreneurial organization. Finally, across these observations I propose the term “volunteering on demand” to describe the form of organising and practicing volunteering in a digitalised, entrepreneurial, cross-sector organization.