The 150‐Year‐Old Hybrid Organization: A Historical View on Municipally Owned Corporations ( MOC ) in Sweden

ABSTRACT This article presents a 150‐year longitudinal analysis of the development of municipally owned corporations (MOCs) in Sweden, tracing their emergence in the mid‐nineteenth century, their expansion during the growth of the welfare state, and their transformation in the era of market‐oriented public sector reform. While MOCs are commonly discussed in relation to New Public Management (NPM) and contemporary forms of hybrid governance, this perspective overlooks their much longer historical trajectory. Drawing on three major Swedish government inquiries (1924, 1965, and 1982), complemented by secondary historical sources, we examine how MOCs have evolved across changing political, economic, and administrative contexts. The article conceptualizes MOCs as constitutional hybrids, organizations that combine elements of public authority and corporate governance by design, and employs insights from institutional theory and historical institutionalism to analyze their long‐term development. The findings identify three historical phases characterized by changing functions, governance rationales, and institutional expectations. Across these periods, MOCs were repeatedly reinterpreted and adapted to new circumstances while maintaining their basic organizational form. The study contributes to the literature on hybridity by demonstrating that hybridity should be understood not merely as a contemporary consequence of public sector reform, but as a historically evolving institutional condition. We argue that the enduring presence of MOCs reflects the adaptive capacity of hybrid organizational forms, whose flexibility allows them to accommodate shifting demands for efficiency, legitimacy, accountability, and public value. By historicizing hybridity, the article offers a new perspective on institutional resilience, and the long‐term evolution of public governance.