We owe Williamson for the formal introduction of hybrid organizations as essential building blocks in ‘the institutional structure of production’. The analysis of these institutional arrangements, which culminated in The Mechanisms of Governance, provided a unified approach to the variety of setting within which transactions are embedded, opening a new perspective on a cornerstone of modern economies. This essay explores the past, present, and future of this breakthrough. First, it reviews the progressive integration of hybrids as a category of their own in the classic ‘make-or-buy’ model, inserting hybrids as an ‘intermediate’ form different from markets in that adaptation cannot be done unilaterally and different from ‘unified organizations’ in that adaptation cannot be done by fiat. Second, it shows how this initial characterization of hybrids, besides providing a coherent approach to empirical research available at the time, gave a powerful impulse to new contributions, identifying more rigorously the fundamental features of hybrids, throwing light on why firms go hybrid, and explicating the governance structure chosen. Last, it offers insights on a research program that remains a work in progress, delineating new terrains to explore and new puzzles to solve.

我们应该感谢威廉姆森正式引入混合组织作为“生产的制度结构”的基本组成部分。对这些制度安排的分析，最终形成了治理机制，为嵌入交易的各种环境提供了统一的方法，为现代经济的基石开辟了新的视角。本文探讨了这一突破的过去、现在和未来。首先，它回顾了在经典的“制造或购买”模型中将混合动力作为其自身类别的逐步整合，将混合动力作为不同于市场的“中间”形式插入，因为适应不能单方面进行，也不同于“统一”。组织在这种适应中不能通过法令来完成。其次，它展示了混合动力的这种初始特征，除了为当时可用的实证研究提供了一种连贯的方法外，还为新的贡献提供了强大的动力，更严格地确定了混合动力的基本特征，阐明了公司为什么要混合动力，并说明所选择的治理结构。最后，它提供了对一项仍在进行中的研究计划的见解，描绘了要探索的新领域和要解决的新谜题。