Sustainable Governance in Hybrid Organizations: An International Case Study of Water Companies

In Sustainable Governance in Hybrid Organizations the author Linne Marie Lauesen explores how businesses that have succeeded in conducting sustainable governance, manage and govern their sustainable performance: in other words, how they manage to be economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable. In this respect, hybrid organizations that are formed as businesses with a mission to be sustainable and to provide services for society - such as water companies - are a good point of departure. Water companies are highly regulated whilst working primarily for the betterment of society and on behalf of generations to come, for whom clean and plentiful water and the preservation of nature is a must. Linne Marie has dug deep into these types of hybrid organizations in order to reveal which mechanisms of organizational governance for sustainability are at play, and how these organizations manage to balance their triple bottom lines in order to survive financially, socially, and environmentally and make a business out of their conduct. Balancing these three bottom lines in a sustainable way is explained in a clear and accessible way and the juxtaposition between non-profit and for-profit water companies will show how this model can be transferred to other business spheres.

Dr Linne Marie Lauesen, PhD, is currently a project manager and business analyst of a water company called Vand and Affald (Water and Waste) in Denmark. She has been active in the field of CSR and sustainability for more than 10 years. She completed her PhD at Copenhagen Business School, Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility in March 14, 2014, and received a notable evaluation of her thesis: Corporate Social Responsibility in the Water Sector: How Material Practices and their Symbolic and Physical Meanings Form a Colonising Logic.