Collaborative Social Innovation in the Hybrid Domain - Organization and Rationality.

What are the institutional attributes that support the use of ICTs for social innovation? Based on the concept of the 'hybrid domain', we seek to better understand how various stakeholders with different priorities collaborate, combine economic and social objectives, and reconceptualize multi-stakeholder collaborative governance in the Global South. Using insights from behavioral economics and social psychology, we focus on two institutional aspects of social innovation - organizational arrangements and rationality. On the one hand, it is well recognized that social innovation stakeholders include not just states and commercial enterprises, but also NGOs, social enterprises, and for-profit/non-profit hybrid organizations. On the other hand, the rationality that brings together these stakeholders is not well articulated. While scholarship has emphasized utilitarian rationality, we highlight the importance of pro-social behavior in collaboration. We argue that scholarship in the past century has focused on utilitarian rationality while neglecting the role of prosocial behavior in collaboration. Further research on prosocial behavior and its incorporation in organizational theory would contribute to understanding the dynamics of collaboration for social innovation.