Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to share that we are editing a special issue of Management Communication Quarterly (MCQ) on Hybrid Organizing for Social Good: Implications for Communication.
Social actors–individuals, groups, organizations, interorganizational networks, communities–navigate pluralistic environments, in which multiple societal-level orders, taken-for-granted rules, institutionalized ideals, belief systems, and cultural norms compete to shape actor cognition, communication, and action (Ganesh & Stohl, 2021; Greenwood et al., 2011; Waisbord, 2023). Navigating this complexity may require concomitant hybridity in forms, cultures, identities, archetypes, categories, platforms, and/or institutional logics.
This special issue focuses on how social actors engage in hybrid forms of organizing and communication to create social good. We argue that hybrid organizing offers implications not just for organizations, but for individuals, for social groups, for interorganizational and community networks, and for society itself. As social actors increasingly embrace hybrid identities and orientations that are often competing, they likely experience contradictions and tensions, and we are interested in the dynamic interplay between multiple elements. Hence, we welcome studies that foreground hybridity as ongoing communicative processes that create, re-create, and sustain social actors. Moreover, we emphasize communication as a form of action with constitutive power, and how communicative processes and social interaction create a new reality.
The submission deadline is March 31, 2026. Please see the attached Call for Papers or MCQ website (https://journals.sagepub.com/page/mcq/2026-special-issue-cfp) for further details. We will also host two virtual editors' office hours for prospective contributors (please email Sophia Fu at sophia.fu@rutgers.edu for the Zoom information).
1) Wednesday November 12, 2025: 9-10am EST
2) Monday December 8, 2025: 2-3pm EST
We look forward to your submissions and to advancing conversations on hybridity, communication, and social good.
Warmly,
Sophia Fu (Rutgers University)
Katherine Cooper (DePaul University)
Ward Van Zoonen (University of Jyvaskyla)
Joshua Barbour (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Guest Editors, Management Communication Quarterly
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Jiawei Sophia Fu
Assistant Professor
Rutgers U - School of Communication and Information
New Brunswick NJ
United States
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