Befriending Aliens: Institutional Complexity and Organizational Responses in Infrastructure Public–Private Partnerships

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) must achieve legitimacy in the form of social acceptance from diverse audiences such as politicians, government agencies, private contractors, interest groups, and the general public. To advance understanding of such delicate balancing among multiple reference audiences, we adopt the lens of institutional theory to illustrate that PPPs inherently exhibit strong institutional complexity due to the presence of multiple institutional logics, making them organizationally challenging to manage. Our theoretical contribution includes the development of a set of propositions to form a conceptual model to explain not only why and how PPPs exhibit institutional complexity, but also how to respond to it through logic by combining strategies such as organizational hybridization.