Fall 2025 Colloquium Series

Although facilitating interdisciplinarity has become both a consensus and a buzzword in research and higher education, pursuing entrepreneurial interdisciplinary initiatives within discipline-based universities remains highly challenging, with tensions most evident in interdisciplinary academic units. How do such organizations engage with competing disciplinary and interdisciplinary logics? This study examines how hybrid organizations experience and respond to institutional complexity. Drawing on an inductive comparative analysis of six interdisciplinary organizations within a Chinese university, we find that even within the same field, organizations encounter institutional complexity in distinct ways and adopt differentiated response strategies. In particular, the status of the dominant logic emerges as the key mechanism linking institutional structures to organizational responses by shaping governance arrangements and organizational practices. Overall, this study advances explanation of the “paradox of interdisciplinarity” and contributes to broader understanding on how hybrid organizations survive and evolve under institutional complexity.

 

Yu Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate at Zhejiang University and a visiting scholar (2024-2025) in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona. Her research interests lie at the intersection of institutional theory and interdisciplinary innovation, with a particular focus on the governance of interdisciplinary organizations.